How Snap Discovered Android

In recent months, Snap has made a big push to improve its performance on Android. To ensure its iPhone-heavy employees understood the software better, Snap offered employees a free Android phone of their choice. Snap made a push to hire Android-focused engineers, and created a team in its Seattle office dedicated to the operating system.

These steps, along with Mr. Spiegel’s previously unreported appearances on Reddit, highlight just how important the Android community has become for Snap ahead of its IPO. The company has acknowledged in its IPO filing earlier this month that its shortcomings on Android hurt its user growth. The filing showed that daily active users rose only 3% in the fourth quarter and that it was flat outside of North America and Europe. Android is the dominant smartphone operating system outside of North America, particularly in the developing world.

A person familiar with Snap’s struggles says the company’s problems with Android reflect its long-held philosophy of only focusing on high-end users, who in the U.S. tend to be mostly iPhone owners. The fact that its Android problems got as bad as they did show the limitations of that focus.

Snap executives had noticed the growth slowdown with alarm last fall, the person said. After investigating the issue, they realized that at least part of the problem could be the Snapchat Android app. The problems were clear with the rollout last summer of Snapchat’s camera roll feature Memories, which didn’t do well on Android. In online forums, Android owners complained that Snapchat was buggy, battery-draining and prone to crashing. Some users abandoned the app, at least temporarily. The app’s bugs were pronounced on Samsung phones like Galaxy S7, which is the top-selling high-end Android device on the market.

More fundamentally, though, some people at Snap suspected the problems reflected the fact that Snap’s design team was—like Mr. Spiegel himself—made up of iPhone users primarily, a person familiar with the matter said. Snapchat had debuted on the iPhone and only came to Android later, though that's not a unique practice.

The company even acknowledged this in its IPO filing, noting, “We have prioritized development of our products to operate with iOS operating systems rather than smartphones with Android operating systems.” And it continued, “To continue growth in user engagement, we will need to prioritize development of our products to operate on” Android-powered phones.

Many app companies have struggled developing products for Android, which runs on many devices with different screen sizes and other components. Also, many phones don’t run on the latest version of the operating system, making it harder to keep the app’s features consistent.

Many app companies have struggled developing products for Android, which runs on many devices with different screen sizes and other components.

And other tech companies have had “wake-up calls” about the importance of Android apps. Indeed, the program for Snap employees to get a free Android phone is a page out of Facebook’s playbook from 2014, when it too reckoned with the fact that its Silicon Valley employees were frequently iPhone owners and out of touch with the broader market.

In recent months, Snap executives began advocating that its team think more about Android first. At around the same time, Mr. Spiegel began responding to complaints on Reddit, under his personal account evanthomasspiegel. The account has been officially “verified” by Reddit.

For Snap, the new commitment to fixing its Android app is another example of the fast learning process it needs to undergo in order to succeed as a public company.

Since the crisis surfaced last fall, many of the bigger issues that caused the Android problems were addressed.

Some commenters on Reddit have noticed—to a point. “It's been getting steadily better. I can actually say I don't want to toss my phone whenever I open up the app now,” one commented.