A petition to roll back on Snapchat’s new design has now managed to secure over a million signatures.
According to the creator of the Change.org petition Nic Rumsey, the update’s “many ‘new features’ are useless or defeat the original purpose Snapchat has had for the past years.’
As of writing the petition currently has 1,010,131 signatures.
The new update features a major redesign that splits interactions between friends from those by brands, celebrities and influencers.
Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegal said in a blog post that in the past, mixing the two was “blurring the lines between professional content creators and your friends” and that it had been and “interesting Internet experiment.”
One of the unfortunate side-effects from this is that any celebrities or influencers you were following are now effectively partitioned away in a separate part of the app forcing you to search for them every time you want to view their content.
Reactions to the update have been almost universally negative with the app achieving only a three star rating on Apple’s App Store.
A number of celebrities have also spoken out against the update including Chrissy Teigen who tweeted: “I liked that you guys felt like we were friends. I’m sad it doesn’t feel like that anymore. How many people have to hate an update for it to be reconsidered?”
Kylie Jenner also responded to a fan’s complaint about the new update saying, “I kinda agree 😢”.
Snapchat’s response so far has simply been: “Updates as big as this one can take a little getting used to, but we hope the community will enjoy it once they settle in.”
While it’s unlikely that Snapchat will completely redesign the app again, it could well make some incremental changes that address the most common issues that users are having.
Perhaps underestimating the importance of its influencers and celebrities the company could well make some changes to either increase access to those snaps within the app.