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Comment by odonnellryan | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat is really bad at doing the one thing I want it to do well: take pictures. It takes awful pictures most of the time. Applies some kind of super-harsh filter that I don't get with my camera?

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They deliberately give you a bad quality photo and I don't know why. Snapchat takes a screenshot. It doesn't use the camera API on your phone as it should. So it doesn't get any of the processing which is integral to taking good photos on phones. Apple should reject it from the App Store for doing this, but for some reason they let them do it, as well as Instagram and Facebook.

Well it's almost certainly going to be faster (thumb to save latency) to run the camera in video mode and then snatch a frame when the user hits the button than the normal preview-stillshot way the phone takes pics natively.

Cell phone OEMs differentiate with camera quality and so some run some pretty heavy post processing to make images come out okay.

Snap probably cares more about quickly taking picture and the filters.

But, quite frankly, using the native API’s has not been that difficult for me as a solo coder who is writing an iOS video camera app on the side.

If they have so many resources, a decision like this is baffling.

Faster as in, faster to take pictures. Not faster to code. The native camera app on my phone is horrendously slow to take a picture; Snap is instantaneous.

Why is the latency of concern in Snapchat but not anywhere else? The native camera app isn't slow on modern phones.

Latency is a concern on the native apps too, but as tradeoffs go, cell OEMs care about mag/site reviews and "it takes a little longer to take a capture" buried deep in the text will be worth much less than better-looking example photos in the side by side.

They started with the low-latency version, so if they switch to higher-latency code now it would feel like a huge performance degradation.

I wasn't under the impression that the difference of 1s in latency was a major problem for the Snap userbase. Do I misunderstand the product?

Iirc the issue comes down to Android. Until very recently there was not real uniform api for accessing the camera between Android versions and the tweaks hardware vendors make. Basically it was much easier to screenshot the live preview then access the raw camera data.

This changed a couple of versions a go and if you used SnapChat on the pixel 2 it used the new APIs instead of taking a screenshot.

But I can’t comment persoanally on the quality of snapchats pictures as I’ve never used it.

Huh? There has been a camera API since the very first release of Android and it's been systematically updated for the entire history of the platform. What do you mean by "real uniform API for accessing the camera", exactly?

What I mean is snapchat was having issues with using the camera API in android across the variety of devices when they first ported the app to Android (2012 iirc) so they took "the easy route" and captured the still from the live preview instead. The API would work for some devices but not others (I remember other camera app's having similar issues around the same time, mainly not being able to tweak the camera settings within 3rd part camera apps) so basically they said "fuck it" and took the easy path and it just stuck around.

I believe since Lollipop they have been using the new camera API for Android.

If you've ever taken a selfie before, it feels weird to freeze your smile pose for even a full second. People taking a selfie want to touch the button when they see their face look natural in the preview and they want it to save instantly.

And, depending on phone (esp budget android) it really can take up to like 2s for a still to go off.

OT, but how did you figure out how Snapchat takes pictures?

It's fairly obvious if you use the app.

They deliberately take screenshots of the camera preview so that what you see is exactly what you get. Given the horrendous (i.e. several second) lag of the shutter button on many smartphones, this makes a lot of sense for an app designed to capture fleeting moments (especially since they won't be viewed for more than a few seconds).

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