Snapchat’s Notifications Are the Worst
[Steps up onto soap box.]
I actively avoid using Snapchat because its notification system is so bad. It’s a messaging service that doesn’t show you your messages in the notification preview. Instead, you get bland and unhelpful notifications saying “John sent a message.” Great. I tap on the notification to go into the chat view and reply. Now that I have an active conversation going, my notifications get even worse because when my chat buddy starts to type, I get another notification saying that they’re typing. Not the little typing indicator within the chat view that every other messaging service does. No. A full-on notification sent to the lock screen that buzzes my phone or watch with the text “John is typing…”. I don’t want typing indicator notifications and I don’t need them, but hell if I can figure out how to turn them off without turning off all of Snapchat’s notifications altogether.
But Snapchat is primarily a photo messaging service, you might say. Surely those notifications are better. Nope. Instead of showing a photo preview in the notification, you just get a big red (or purple for videos) square image to let you know that you have a photo waiting for you. Super helpful, thanks.
I assume part of the problem is that Snapchat is erring on the side of privacy, seeing as part of their differentiation is that their messages are only temporary. Photos can often only be seen once and old chats fade from the conversation history (also super annoying, in my opinion). But that’s not how everyone uses Snapchat, and it sure would be great to have more user preferences that I could adjust for how I receive my messages.
(And while I’m on a rant about Snapchat, I’m also often put into a bad mood when I open their app because they’ve put the ‘My AI’ chat at the very top of my chat list. But it seems to load slower than all the other chats, so when I aim and tap on the top conversation in my list, at the last second the list refreshes and I find myself tapping into the AI chat instead. So I’m often extra annoyed.)
Snapchat, I’m sure you can do better. But since you don’t seem to want to, I’ll continue to prefer Instagram DMs, iMessages, Discord chats, and basically any other service that does their notifications in a sane way.
[Steps down from soap box.]
This is post #24/31 for Blaugust 2024.