If you’ve ever wondered why the photos and videos you share on Snapchat from your Android Smartphone seem low-quality, you are not alone.
The reason is in the way that Snapchat takes the photos, since practically what it does is a screenshot of what is seen through the camera. This does not mean that it is a limitation of Android and it is not a question of the iPhone either. It’s because the Snapchat development team made the decision to go the easy way rather than create a better-optimized app for Android.
Why are Snapchat photos on Android worse?
Since Android 5.0 Lollipop , applications can have full access to camera hardware through a feature called API Camera2 . This means that you have access to professional settings, being able to manually control the exposure, capture RAW images, in addition to the post-processing that is performed on each photo, thus obtaining high-quality photos in third-party applications.
But Snapchat doesn’t use this feature. Instead, your Android app just takes the results straight from the camera. Compare, for example, a photo taken by an application like Instagram that actually uses the camera’s hardware and software using the Camera2 API, achieving the highest possible resolution.
Same image, same angle, same phone, yet a very different result. Today’s Android Smartphones have top-notch hardware that takes amazing photos, why doesn’t Snapchat? We can better explain the problem by seeing a comparison with Snapchat on iOS .
Why does Snapchat take better quality photos on iOS?
When you develop an application for iOS, you only have to worry about one device: the iPhone. With only 15 models in total, it is easy to make an application that works correctly on all Apple devices.
Android, however, is very different. There are hundreds of devices with different hardware components that you need to check. And very few of these devices use the same version of Android. In fact, only 53% of devices have Android Lollipop or higher. So slightly less than half of the Android devices on the market do not use the Camera2 API.
So, the Snapchat team seems to have decided not to waste time optimizing the app for different versions of Android and instead decided to take the snapshots directly from the information on the screen. In this way, the application can be used on all Android devices even if the quality is lower.
To see the difference between an optimized application and one that is not, we can take a look at the following photos. The one on the left is taken with an Android while the one on the right was taken by a small child with an iPhone .
At first glance, the image quality of the Android might seem a bit better. So let’s focus on the enlarged area. Keep in mind that the Android (Pixel XL) has a much better camera. So the sharpness and contrast are a little more pleasing to the eye. But even with a lower camera. The Snapchat image taken with the iPhone 6 is much less pixelated at a much higher zoom.
So yeah, Snapchat photos on Android are more pixelated. And yes, the iPhone takes better photos on Snapchat. But this is not an Android or device failure but a matter for the Snapchat development team.