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Snapchat's overhauled redesign should be hitting your phone soon

People hated the new look. Snapchat got the message.

Katie Collins Senior European Correspondent
Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Katie Collins
2 min read
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And we're back to chronological Snapchat.

Snapchat

Snapchat started to roll out its second redesign in six months to iPhone users late on Thursday. It's hoping to win back the people it alienated with an overhaul introduced earlier this year.

The redesign sees the company backtrack on some of the features that failed to resonate with users, including returning Snaps and Chats to chronological order and returning stories created by your friends to the right-hand tab. It has also added a separate subscriptions feed to make it easier to find stories from your favorite creators, publishers and shows, the company confirmed the to CNET on Friday.

Human beings tend to resist change, so a little grumbling from users when an online service rolls out a redesign is par for the course. But Snapchat's redesign, which it first revealed back in November, was an unmitigated disaster for the company and was even partially blamed for its poor financial results last week.

It's rare for companies to row back on redesigns, but Snapchat succumbed to pressure after over a million users signed a petition.

In an earnings call last week, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the company was "optimizing the redesign" based on its ongoing experimentation and learning.

"We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to optimize for both competing behaviors," he said. "We are currently rolling out an update to address this."

This update is iOS-only for now and there's no word yet on when it will come to Android.

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