Snap is testing a “simplified version of Snapchat,” CEO Evan Spiegel said in a letter to employees published on the company's website on Tuesday. The CEO said the simplified version is intended to improve the platform's accessibility and ease of use. For those who remember Snapchat's 2018 redesign, the news may do little to boost confidence.
Spiegel sought to boost employee morale in his letter on Tuesday after a dismal year that saw the company's shares fall nearly 50% in 2024.
“Investors are concerned that we are not growing fast enough,” Spiegel said in the letter.
The “simplified” Snapchat may be an attempt to win over older users who have historically been confused by the app's unintuitive design — Snapchat is much better at attracting younger users who quickly understand the app — but this isn't the first time Snapchat has tried to solve these problems.
You may remember that on Snap's 2017 earnings call, Spiegel acknowledged that he'd heard people, especially older people, find Snapchat hard to understand or use. A few months later, Snap pushed through a major redesign to win back those users, squeezing Stories in between private messages and making other changes that ended up infuriating rather than engaging them.
In 2018, a Change.org petition to “remove Snapchat's new update” garnered 1.2 million signatures, with celebrity influencers like Kylie Jenner, Chrissy Teigen, and Marcus Brownlee expressing their dissatisfaction. But even worse, the redesign caused ad views and revenue to plummet for the platform, alienating younger users and failing in its attempts to attract an older demographic. By May 2018, Snap was scrambling to roll back some of the changes.
Spiegel wrote in Tuesday's letter that early tests of the streamlined redesign were “directionally good,” but the CEO said he would be “careful about making any changes of this magnitude” — he was almost certainly alluding to a failed 2018 redesign that no one at Snap has forgotten.
The announcement of the stripped-down version of Snapchat was included in Spiegel's broader discussion of Snap's business strategy, in which he argued that Snap's foray into augmented reality glasses, which it calls Spectacles, would create an uncontested market. Perhaps he's pretending that Meta's AR glasses, the Meta Ray-Bans, don't exist?
In an effort to spice up Snapchat's struggling advertising division, Spiegel also announced new ad placements called “Sponsored Snaps” and “Promoted Places” — the former allowing advertisers to send Snapchats directly to users' chat inboxes, and the latter allowing advertisers to promote destinations on Snap Map.