Snapchat overhaul will completely redesign app: it'll be easier to use

Snap, the company behind Snapchat, has announced its third fiscal quarter results, revealing details about its app as it existed throughout the past quarter — both goods and bad things. On the upside, Snap says that Snapchat crash rates were down across the board since it started keeping track last year. The company also revealed plans for a big app redesign.

Snapchat has been historically criticized as hard to use, and while that hasn't stopped it from earning millions of users, it is acknowledged as a potential stumbling block toward faster growth. Snap revealed that in its third quarter, it had less daily active users "than we would have liked," seeing only 4.5 million new users...this being nearly half of what some analysts had expected.

The company is hoping to draw in more users next year, though that's not to say that Snapchat isn't popular. Snap explained that it reaches more than 70-percent of people aged 13 to 34 in the US, UK, France, and Australia, for example. The company plans to drive home efforts to target age groups over 34, though, as well as Android users in particular and those in parts of the world not mentioned above.

How will Snap do that? By making some changes to Snapchat, hopefully for the better. A key part of that will be a redesigned Android app built from the ground up that will have a limited launch before rolling out to a wider user base. The redesign will be built on the foundation of knowledge Snap has formed over the past five or so years, the company says; "we wish we had done this sooner," it noted.

During the Q3 talks, Snap noted that its Android design is going to be a huge one...so big, in fact, that it may change the may some people use the service. Talking about, company CEO Evan Spiegel said:

One thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback. As a result, we are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use. There is a strong likelihood that the redesign of our application will be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don't yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application. We're willing to take that risk for what we believe are substantial longterm benefits to our business.

SOURCE: Snap