Snapchat’s latest update aimed at app redesign and broadening the appeal of the youth-oriented social network, has sparked a backlash from many users complaining about the abrupt overhaul in their preferred Snapchat using experience.
More than 578,000 users signed an online petition by midday on Monday, calling on parent firm Snap Inc. to roll back on their previous update, before it was released last week.
“Many users have found that it has not made the app easier to use, but has, in fact, made many features more difficult,” according to the petition at change.org.
“Many ‘new features’ are useless or defeat the original purposes Snapchat has had for the past years,” it adds.
Twitterati took the issue to task in a string of various comments:
“I don’t even wanna use Snapchat till they fix this update, I just immediately get mad when I open the app,” a user tweeted.
“This Snapchat update is the worst thing to happen since U2’s album was downloaded to everyone’s phone,” another Twitter comment remarked.
Supermodel Chrissy Teigen voiced her stance to the protests, tweeting, “How many people have to hate an update for it to be reconsidered?”
Some Snapchat users even complained that the ;latest app update automatically downloaded to their phones and may have caused the loss of some messages or archived data known as ‘Memories’.
Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst who follows social media for the research firm eMarketer, said it was too soon to judge user reaction and backlash to the redesign.
“We’re watching users’ reaction to Snapchat’s redesign very closely, but at this point, we don’t see it having an impact on usage among young people,” she said.
“It’s very possible that once they get used to the new way the app is laid out, they will use it just as heavily as before.”
Twitter users have even gone as far as offering tips on how to uninstall the latest update to get the old version of Snapchat back.
But the Snapchat support team tweeted, “unofficial workarounds to change the way Snapchat looks are temporary and can result in getting permanently locked out of your account or losing Memories.”