We’ve all had to contend with those dreadful quality of videos when checking our friends’ snaps.
And it's not just about the camera quality...
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Don’t you just hate it when you open someone’s snap and the video that pops up is something similar to ‘CCTV-quality’?
Look, the fact of the matter is the image quality on Snapchat sucks, well for most Android users. The quality is nothing short of grainy with low resolution.
The sole reason for the poor quality is because Snapchat does not actually take photos on an Android device. It instead grabs a screenshot of your camera’s live video feed.
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Camera2 API
Most apps running on Android 5.0 Lollipop can have full access to your device’s camera hardware using a feature called Camera2 API.
This means that they can have manual exposure controls, capture raw images to do post-processing themselves, and tons of other goodies that can make pictures taken by third-party apps look just as great as they do with Android's stock camera app.
However, Snapchat does not contain this feature. This means that it just asks to look at what your camera sees, then records the results.
This being a clear contrast to an app like Instagram that actually taps into your camera’s hardware to take full-resolution pics using Camera2 API.
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Snapchat on iOS
Developing an app for iOS should solely focus on supporting one device-the iPhone. With only 15 total models ever made, it's easy to make an app that works properly with every Apple phone out there.
But for Android there are hundreds of unique devices with various hardware components that need to be accounted for.
With just about slightly over 50 per cent of devices having Android Lollipop or higher, one can understand why half of the phones out there do not support Camera2 API.
So next time an iPhone user complains about your grainy pics or crappy video quality, do not worry, that’s just about Snapchat development team’s fault. Well, unless your camera quality is also an issue.
