by Jennifer Guaraguara
I wake up and as always the first thing I do is check my phone as many students do and, I go straight to Snapchat. Right then and there I realize, I am now a victim of the Snapchat Update. After seeing everyone’s negative comments, I hoped I was one of the lucky few who had Automatic Updates turned off. I was wrong.
So, why is the update so bad? Well, the layout is completely different and extremely disorganized. Stories or posts from friends were moved together on the left side of the app, causing people to lose views, and not being able to find friend’s stories. To find specific stories one would have to look up the person’s name. If you swipe right on the app you will be able to find only publisher content, which used to be stories and your own story.
People desperately craved the old Snapchat, so they found a way to get it back by deleting snapchat, turning off automatic updates, and changing their password. It works for less than five minutes, then snapchat updates itself once again. There have also been several memes about Snapchat users feeling confused on the app. Ratings on the app are now at a 1.9 rating on the App Store due to all the negative reviews it has been getting.
All over social media there has been complaints, and people deleting the app including Kylie Jenner who tweeted on February 21st “does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me.” After Jenner’s tweet, Snap’s stock fell drastically, Snapchat has lost approximately $1.5 billion in market value.
There has been a ‘Remove the new Snapchat update’ petition and it has hit over one million signatures from angry users. Snapchat has responded to the petition on February 20th, “by putting everything from your friends in one place, our goal was to make it easier to connect with the people you care about most,” said Snapchat. In their response they said soon they will introduce new tabs and making the app more customized to each user.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel went to the Goldman Sachs Internet & Technology Conference on February 15th. “Even the frustrations validate the changes,” said Spiegel at the conference, he also explained that users will get used to the new layout.
Besides all of the negative things, Snapchat did add several new fonts and emojis, which was highly appreciated by many users. Although the new update outage did keep Snapchat in the news and keep people talking. But, hopefully Snapchat will at least bring back old features like Best Friends.
