Snap Inc. made it clear earlier this month that it had been prioritizing iOS over Android with its messaging app Snapchat. Apple’s platform is where the bulk of its users are at, but it appears that the company is now making efforts to turn this around.
In Snap’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) filing from last week, it was revealed that Snapchat’s active users weren’t increasing outside of the US, where Android is the more prevalent platform.
The Snapchat Android app itself was partly to blame, suggests The Information, with bugs, crashing and battery issues appearing after the rollout of its Memories update last year.
Since its executives identified the problems, Snap has offered its employees a free Android phone, hired more devs with Android experience, and “Created a team in its Seattle office dedicated to the operating system,” claims The Information. The company’s CEO Evan Spiegel has even taken to Reddit to interact with Android users first-hand.
Though The Information notes that the “Bigger issues that caused the Android problems” have now been addressed —was this not a strange oversight from Snap?
An estimate from November 2016 suggests that Android holds more than 85 percent of the global smartphone OS market share, and overtook iOS a number of years ago. Meanwhile, an estimate from earlier in 2016 suggested that Android had almost 60 percent of the platform share in Snapchat’s core market, the US (Android is also believed to have overtaken iOS there years previously).
I appreciate that Snapchat has a higher user base on iOS, and Apple’s iPhones have typically been viewed as the more “glamorous” products compared to Android phones, but the research says that there are far more people using Android… and Snapchat is a free app: it’s not like Snap had to target a premium market if its goal was to increase active users.
What are your thoughts on Snap’s recent moves? Let us know in the comments.
from Android Authority http://ift.tt/2ljSWk0
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