Snapchat is Struggling On Android — The Information (Feb 14, 2017)
I’ve tweaked the headline here to reflect the content of the article: the point here that Snapchat doesn’t work as well on Android as on the iPhone, where it began and where most of its employees and many of its users are. This wasn’t an accident – Snap is open in its S-1 filing about the fact that it has prioritized iPhone until now, and that’s not an unusual strategy for developers pursuing the high end market. However, it works a lot better as a strategy for a news, video, photo filter, or other non-social app than it does for a social app – by definition, social apps need broad reach to create the kinds of network effects that make them successful. It’s not that Snapchat hasn’t had an Android app for a long time – it launched it in October 2012, when it still had a relatively tiny number of users – but that it’s rather neglected the Android app. It explicitly called out some bugs and underperformance as a reason for its lackluster user growth late last year in its IPO filing, but this Information piece argues that it’s not moving fast enough to improve the experience there. And yet it has to be good there if it’s to grow, especially outside the US and major European markets.
via The Information
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