I think this is well deserved. Instagram Story's experience to me is way nicer and more complete since it integrates perfectly with their core photo sharing product. After I'm done viewing snaps I have on Snapchat, what else is there left to do? With Instagram, I can look at my photo feed and go to people's profiles, and all of the back-navigation works perfectly. Meanwhile, Snapchat's app is slow, buggy, and doesn't even take nice pictures. Other than the more gimmicky features, such as face filters which will inevitably come to Instagram, the product feels way behind.
Instagram is oriented towards consumption; when you open it, it takes you to your feed, and as you mention after posting or viewing stories it makes it easy to consume more.
Snapchat is oriented towards creation. When you open it, it starts on the camera.
There's more to consumption and creation. Snapchat is ephemeral and fun - so you're somewhere and thinking "this would be a great snap" so it makes sense to open to the camera.
Instagram is so much more self-regulated and bound in crafting identity. You're right in that it's much more focused on consuming since the barrier to posting is much higher than snapping.
Snapchat is becoming a replacement for texting here as well. I've now overheard twice people say things like "I'll snap at ya" as they part directions and wave.
100%. It's going to be hard to kill Snapchat with a clone if you don't open on the camera. Which you can't really do without ruining the experience for existing users.
The only few times I used Facebook's "My day", I just posted my saved snaps. (and I only did it to see who'd open!)
I don't even use the regular camera app. It's always Snapchat. It's the best casual camera app out there.
I've always been amazed by the product adaptability of Snapchat in spite of the apps technical shortcomings, so much so that I believed the buginess of their app may have only applied to myself. In a world where Amazon loses X% of dollars from milliseconds of latency, the poor performance and bugs of Snapchat apparently do not matter to most users which is quite surprising.
People are more tolerant of buggy and/or slow tech if said tech might increase their chances of getting laid. A more direct example is Tinder and other dating apps like it: the quality of those apps are somewhat lower than others with similar popularity, but people just deal with it anyway.
Just out of curiosity, what are your issues with Tinder? I haven't really used it a lot, but it seems very nicely-designed. Its performant, the UI is intuitive, it does one thing and does it well. I would almost use it as a case-study in good mobile-first design thinking.
I experience regular UI glitches and occasional full app hangs that require a force kill to reset, the latter most notably in poor connectivity situations like the subway. It's not terrible, it's just not that good either. It's tier-2 app quality with a tier-1 size userbase.
Mostly, but you swipe left to get rid of someone, and swipe left to see the next image a person has if you are on their profile. occasionally I get this mixed up and swipe left on someone I was interested in.
I'm actually on iOS. I used to be a version or two behind, but with an iPhone 6 I expect the camera to open & be ready to shoot video within 2 seconds, which doesn't happen currently. It's much slower and I usually don't end up capturing the moment I want to capture
BTW, the same with Instagram. When I used Android version, most videos were unplayable or freezing in the middle. When pressing photo shutter button actual taking of photo occured 5-10 seconds later so it was a challenge just to take photo (builtin photo app worked well). And it was on older Nexus, not on some random chinese phone.
I read (a long time ago) that Android Snapchat takes a screenshot of the image on the screen projected by the camera, while the iOS Snapchat actually uses the image produced from the camera.
> integrates perfectly with their core photo sharing product
This is the key thing. While I don't use any of their Snapchat cloned features, I do think their photo product is very good. So you can see what they are doing to users like me. I'm now more likely to use their stories because I already like the core product. Also, celebrities have a higher reach on Instagram than on Snapchat, so the transition for them is seamless while also maintaining (and increasing) their existing follower base.
Back before all the AR features, I used a 3rd party client called 6snap for Windows Phone. It was so incredibly snappy and had all the features the official one had. I felt it was weird that one person that had tens of apps to maintain did a better job.
Rudy Huyn had published so many great apps in the windows store. I still use 6tag, his instagram app for windows. The last I heard of him, he has taken up a job and doesn't have time to support the apps anymore. The latest official instagram app works worse than an indie app that hasn't been updated in a while.
