Why Snapchat Sucks on Android.
A lot of Android users have been complaining about the performance of Snapchat and how pictures taken from the app don't exactly match up with the camera capabilities of the phone.
iPhone users on the other hand are happier than android users due to the fact that their pictures turn out to be better than the ones taken on android devices. However note that i used "Happier" and not "Happy" as iPhone users also have this issue of pictures not turning out to be exactly the way they expected. Now i can assure you that your phone isn't to blame here and there is nothing wrong with your device. The real problem lies in the app itself. You see when you open your camera app and take a photo from there, the picture is actually the same resolution as your camera, say 12MP or 16MP.
However if you open up the Snapchat app and take a photo from inside the app, you will notice that the photo isn't as detailed and well balanced. This is because in android, Snapchat uses a live video feed to capture images. Its not actually using the camera sensor to its full potential. So try and follow me here. When you take a picture from the camera app you are using the actual sensor and the image that is captured turns out to be the resolution of sensor, whatever it may be. However in Snapchat things work differently. The pictures you take from snapchat uses the size of not the sensor but actually the size of the viewfinder and in this case the viewfinder is our phone's screen. By following this principle, whatever resolution your screen may be, the picture adopts that resolution. So say you have a 1080p screen. That roughly makes 2.1MP. And say you have a 1440p screen, then you will roughly get a picture of resolution 3.3MP.
So in actuality, the picture quality isn't limited to the size of the camera sensor but the actual resolution of your screen. This may be hard to get a grip on but this is in fact true. The developers of Snapchat did this because they wanted to make a streamlined app that was the same for all android phones and it was fair for pretty much every android device out there. What i mean by this is that they developed the app for a standard API which would essentially work on all android phones , relatively smoothly. Since there are a lot of android devices out there and they cant possibly optimize the app for each and every device they resorted to this.
It doesn't exactly work like this in the iPhone but i'm pretty sure that the pictures don't turn out as well as they are supposed to. However the reason why pictures taken on the Snapchat app from the iPhone look better than those taken from an android device ,even if the android device has a 1440p screen , is that the camera hardware is pretty limited in iPhones and the developers back at Snapchat only have to optimize the app for that one particular piece of hardware and not a plethora of devices like in android.Thus , the Snapchat app on the iPhone is much more refined and polished, as most apps are.
So there you have it. The reason why your photos suck on Snapchat. This probably can be fixed with an update to the app, given that the devs at Snapchat redo the whole API. However with whatever little knowledge i have of API's i can safely say that this isn't going to be happening any time soon, so you're pretty much stuck with the current version of Snapchat as it is.
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