Snapchat rebuilt its Android app to not be a laggy mess

By Joe Maring
published

If you've ever used Snapchat's Android app, you'll know that there's a lot of room for improvement. While Snapchat's pushed out numerous updates over the years to make the experience as good as can be, the app is often laggy with slow performance — even on some flagship phones.

Thankfully, with the update that's rolling out as of April 8, things should start to get a lot better.

See more

This latest update is a completely rebuilt version of Snapchat for Android, and while it doesn't look any different visually, it's totally different under the hood. While we've yet to confirm it ourselves, this should make Snapchat on Android just as fast and smooth as its iOS counterpart.

Speaking of iOS, the rewrite should also allow for better feature parity between the two app versions — meaning the Android app will get new features as they're released for iOS and not weeks or months later. In fact, in an interview with Android Authority, Snap Vice President of Product Jacob Andreou said:

With this new foundation I wouldn't be surprised if you actually see things starting to come to Android even before iOS sometimes.

I'm not much of a Snapchat user myself these days, but if any of you are, you should get the update soon if you haven't already.

Download: Snapchat (free) (opens in new tab)

Joe Maring
Joe Maring

Joe Maring was a Senior Editor for Android Central between 2017 and 2021. You can reach him on Twitter at @JoeMaring1.

8 Comments
  • Thank God, this is something that has been needed for a long time. Great news that it's finally being taken care of.
    Thanks snapchat
  • It's a funny joke, I just opened snapchat and as soon as I tried to use a filter I thought I was using a phone from 8 years ago, it was a laggy unusable mess, and it's not even like I'm using a low range smartphone, I'm using an s9+, so in theory there should be no issues, but it still runs like ****.
  • Is it still the #1 battery hog?
  • So is the newest version number 10.54.5.0? Still seems laggy AF to me.
  • I don't know how I should take this information considering 2 things that could make the usage of Snapchat a lot better. 1. Snapchat is still poorly optimized in terms of battery usage. On my OnePlus 6T, I shouldn't be receiving "High Battery Consumption" notifications when Snapchat is in use. Fix this. 2. Snapchat still has bad camera quality. Instead of using our actual cameras, when you snap a picture, the app actually screenshots what it sees from your camera. How you can tell is the second you go to snap a shot, an autofocus like action happens and then the image is blurred. If those 2 things can be fixed and of course the lag they apparently fixed, then Snapchat would be great. Fix this. PS. Snapchat customer support is 100% non existent. I was happy to see they added a feedback/contact feature within the app but you never hear back from Snapchat regardless of the issue.
  • I have a 6T as well and I don't get a battery notification even though I use Snapchat quite a bit (unfortunately).
    What you're referring to as a Screenshot is just a very compressed image so that Snapchat has less data to handle (lower costs).
  • Snapchat is still a thing? Huh
  • Camera api still trash