Barely have the murmurs of Snap Inc. going public settled down and now Snapchat, which rebranded itself as Snap in September, is getting some changes.
The layout for Snapchat, the popular mobile messaging app which boasts over 150 million daily active users, is now being reorganized by the company to display a user's friends Stories first, followed by Discover and the subscription areas.
The tweak to the design for Snapchat basically means that publisher content is now pushed to the backburner. While publishing partners may not be pleased with this alteration, the fact that one gets to see user Stories on top of the Stories page will be a welcome change.
For the unfamiliar, Stories are basically the collected videos and photos that a Snapchat user shares during the 24-hour window and can be viewed by the user's friends as a montage. This feature is a pretty popular one and was copied by Facebook-owned Instagram as well.
Snap announced the changes on Friday, Oct. 7 and it also gets rid of the Auto Advance feature. Previously, this feature essentially played the ensuing set of snaps on a user's feed automatically but now post the update the Stories will not be advanced mechanically.
The feature basically made it next to impossible for users to select the Story they wanted to watch. However, that is now set to change.
"Starting today for select Snapchatters in our Android community and rolling out soon across all Android and iOS, the Auto Advance feature will be removed to give you control of your Story viewing experience once again!" announced the company in a blog post.
Snap, instead, has a Story Playlist option coming post the update which will enable users to choose the snaps of which friends they wish to view.
Thanks to Story Playlist users will now be able to not only select the Stories they want to view, but also see them in the order they have made the selections. Viewing and adding a story is easy and one will merely need to tap the Story thumbnail on the left of a friend's name. Pressing the play button on the screen's bottom allows one to watch the Stories.
Snapchat will also benefit from a new format for adverts — post-roll ads that will run once you are through with viewing a Story.
The new features will be pushed out to select Android users initially, followed by a complete rollout for both iOS and Android in the near term.
