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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just that my phone (Nexus 5X) is getting old, but Snapchat is probably the worst Android app I've ever used. Not sure how the iOS experience is.

Let's go down the list:

- HUGE (>300 MB)

- Extremely Slow/Laggy UI

- Battery Suck (mainly because it auto turns on location services, etc.)

- Sometimes soft bricks my camera (need to restart in order to use my normal camera app)

I only use it to stay in the loop of my family members, maybe I should start campaigning everyone to switch to Instagram.

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Until a few months ago, Snapchat was not using the Android camera API, it was just basically taking a screenshot from the viewfinder. It is now using the Camera1 api, which was last updated 10 years ago and deprecated 4 years ago. It wouldn't shock me if this ancient api is messing up your camera.

https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/snapchat-upgraded-its-a...

It's a recurring theme in Snapchat's financial disclosures, in fact.

https://stratechery.com/2018/facebooks-story-problem-and-opp...

> - Sometimes soft bricks my camera (need to restart in order to use my normal camera app)

Skype manages to do that on Android as well recently (while it used to work fine before).

If userland software can soft brick the camera, the problem is not the userland software.

This is what happens when you choose “freedom” over stability.

(iOS is not necessarily what I mean by “stability”. Not anymore at least.)

I'm not sure Android is a shining example of freedom.

Compared to iOS? Yes it is.

yes, perhaps, and it can be made more so, but the parent post said essentially 'Android is an example of what happens when you choose freedom over stability', and I don't think Android is a good example of that. There's lots of 'different Androids' but most of the problems come down to manufacturers not quality-testing their software and the (perhaps inevitable) use of all of the proprietary bits in the mobile that third parties thus can't fix/optimise.

Is that a Linux thing rather than being specific to Android ? V4L does a lot of camera stuff in userland.

Android doesn't really user V4L (at least not in most devices). Fact of the matter is that camera drivers are rather buggy on many devices and if you manage to crash the camera library or the kernel module, it'll most likely break other apps.

You can of course blame that on Android, but pretty much no operating system will recover a device when the driver itself is broken and refuses to reset the device properly :)

I gave up about a year ago after a year of using it. I don't know if they solved it now but it never managed to play video without huge lags... So one of the core features of the app. It was also crashing constantly indeed. It's clearly the worst app I've ever used on Android, it was an hackathon-level of quality.

Not sure how big the app is on iOS, but the app works really well for me. I've been really surprised with how quickly they can add features without breaking things. (At least they don't break my normal usage.)

It used to be unusuable on my Moto X -- activating the camera would cause the phone to randomly reboot. Only Snapchat ever did that...

It's always, always been terrible on android. It's to the point i almost think it's intentional for some "influencers use iOS" sort of reason. It works just as terribly on current flagship devices, and the picture quality is still horrible even compared to an iphone 5s

I have exact same experience on my 5X.

They have taken short cuts on Android and instead of fixing the core app, they are focusing on their AR add ons. May be the right choice, but it has ended up with a horrible user experience on Android, at least on mid-level phones.

I find it practically unusable on my iphone 6+, whilst other apps work fine.

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