This past Tuesday saw Snapchat deliver its recent public earnings report and the results weren’t great.
The image messaging and multimedia mobile app continues to add daily active users (DAU) at a disappointingly slow rate of 3 percent — approximately 4.5 million actual new users. The slow user growth, allied with earnings being below Wall Street expectations, saw stock prices plunge nearly 20 percent. In response to the dissatisfactory results, CEO Evan Spiegel stated that “we grew our Daily Active Users at a lower rate than we would have liked,” and therefore going into 2018, the company will be focusing on stimulating user growth.
A complete redesign of the app itself will be the primary method used to achieve this goal. This overhaul comes in response to the feedback that claims the app is “difficult to understand and hard to use” and after the company saw increased usage by Android owners following the optimization of performance on the Android version of the app. Given the 800 million DAU on Instagram, which is an increase in 100 million users from less than six months ago, it would appear that the Snapchat redesign couldn’t arrive sooner.
