Snapchat’s redesigned redesign starts rolling out

Snapchat says it is currently rolling out yet another redesign to its app to iOS users. Late last year, Snapchat launched an overhaul which earned the wrath of dedicated users who hated the new layout. That led to 1.2 million people signing a petition in hopes that Snapchat would revert the redesign to its original form. The company acknowledged that the “new Snapchat has felt uncomfortable for many,” and now the company is yielding to some of those requests for change.


Snap says the new layout puts Snaps and Chats in chronological order again, and moves Stories from your friends back to the right-hand side of the app. When you open the app, it launches the camera, so you can easily swipe left to access the right-hand screen where you’ll find your friends’ content. Like the previous redesign, your friends’ Stories will still remain separate from branded content. Snap has also added a separate Subscriptions feed so you can search more easily for Stories from popular creators and publishers.

We’ve previously reported that Snapchat’s redesign isn’t helping it make money — for the first quarter, the app grew its global users, but it made less money per user. Today’s update was first announced by Snap CEO Evan Spiegel in the company’s first quarter earnings callon May 1st.

At the time, Spiegel said the company was working on optimizing the redesign:

“We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to optimize for both competing behaviors. 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.”

Snap says the update is currently rolling out to “the majority” of users on iOS. There’s no word yet on when the update will be available on Android.