Months After Hated Redesign, Snapchat Rolls Out More Changes To iOS App

Months after Snapchat angered many users with a controversial app redesign, the company is putting out a fix to iOS users. Most users of the app on Apple devices should be able to update it by the end of Friday, according to The Verge.

Originally reported by Recode in April, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced the change during the company’s May 1 earnings report. The new update seeks to address a major complaint about the much-maligned redesign, which is that Stories from friends were separated from content created by celebrities or brands.

That meant private snaps from friends and Stories showed up in the same inbox, while celebrity content was relegated to a separate “Discover” page. Friday’s update makes things similar to how they used to be, with friends’ Stories showing up alongside branded content in the Discover area.

The difference is simple yet significant. Users now swipe the screen in one direction to see Stories from both friends and famous content creators. Another big change is that the message inbox will display snaps and text messages in chronological order again, ditching the algorithmic model Snapchat adopted with the previous redesign.

In short, major parts of Snapchat are now back to their previous look. Spiegel gave a brief explanation for why the app was making these changes during the May 1 earnings call.

“We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to optimize for both competing behaviors," Spiegel said. "We are currently rolling out an update to address this by sorting communication by recency and moving Stories from friends to the right side of the application, while maintaining the structural changes we have made around separating friends from creators and sorting friends’ Stories by relationships.”

The redesign caused months of controversy after celebrity users denounced the app’s new look. Tweets from Kylie Jenner bemoaning the app were said to have caused shares to drop back in February.