The petition against Snapchat’s “annoying” redesign is now close to hitting 1.2 million signatures, having nearly doubled the number of its supporters in the last four days. Started by Australian Nic Rumsey, the campaign criticizes the new look of the app as unintuitive and chaotic, calling for the company to roll back the old user interface. Snap Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel recently dismissed the possibility of doing anything of the sort, claiming that many complaints against the new aesthetic prove the change is working as intended. While speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference earlier this week, Mr. Spiegel said celebrities aren’t your friends and their content hence shouldn’t be mixed with snaps, stories, and direct messages from people you actually know.
The change.org-hosted petition signed by approximately one in eighteen Snapchat users doesn’t argue against the firm’s decision to separate the content posted by celebrities and brands from everything else but is primarily aimed at criticizing the new interface that bundles messages, stories, and snaps into a single list, claiming the move makes the app more difficult to navigate. Last fall, Snap vowed to streamline its app in order to make it more accessible and consequently grow its acquisition rates. The company’s financial report for the fourth quarter of 2017 revealed Snapchat attracted almost nine million new people over the three-month period ending December 31, though the controversial redesign didn’t start rolling out before December and has only been made available on a large scale last month. According to new data collected by app analytics firm Apptopia, nearly three out of four people who reviewed Snapchat on either Android or iOS this month gave it a one-star rating.
Apptopia’s platform still shows Snapchat continues to grow, having added a million users in the United States alone over the course of this month, with people aged 35 to 50 now flocking to the platform in larger numbers and accounting for approximately 17-percent of its audience, up from 13-percent in January. Snapchat’s new redesign was largely meant to “separate social from media,” according to Mr. Spiegel’s previous statements. The Venice, Los Angeles-based company just posted its best quarter to date despite losing $350 million in Q4 2017 as it showed strong signs its revenue will eventually outpace its losses.
Petition Against Snapchat's Redesign