Snapchat update brings complete redesign to app, changing how messages and Discover feature works

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Snapchat has undergone a complete redesign, apparently aimed at making it not so confusing.

The app – which relies on people knowing a whole range of gestures to use in even basic ways – has been repeatedly criticised for putting people off with its strange design. But it's now overhauling that, changing the way the app is organised.

The camera will still open when you open the app, as it always has. But beyond that it will now be focused around just two pages.

Swiping to the left on the camera will bring up a list of friends, organised by who you talk to the most. Everything about those friends – their stories, any messages, and more – will all be collected on that page.

Swiping to the right will bring up a new Discover page, as it always has. But that page has been redesigned to include a whole range of different things: from the hugely controversial Snap Map to posts from publishers and influencers.

"Your subscriptions live at the top, followed by other Stories you might be interested in watching," the company said in a blog post. "Over time, Discover will become uniquely personalised for you.

"While the Stories on Discover are personalised algorithmically, our editors review and approve everything that gets promoted on the page. We believe that this balance of human review and machine personalisation provides the best content experience on mobile."

The company says the redesign has been introduced to "separate social from media" – or keep friends and publishers separate. In doing so it hopes it will address "many of the problems that plague the Internet today", it said, largely by avoiding things like filter bubbles and the spread of fake news.

Both of the new pages will use an individualised algorithm that will watch what you do on Snapchat and decide what you most want to see. Boss Evan Spiegel wrote in an op-ed for Axios that it was doing so in part to try and combat fake news.

"With the upcoming redesign of Snapchat, we are separating the social from the media, and taking an important step forward towards strengthening our relationships with our friends and our relationships with the media," he wrote. "This will provide a better way for publishers to distribute and monetize their Stories, and a more personal way for friends to communicate and find the content they want to watch."

The re-design had been trailed in the company's results at the beginning of this month. It warned investors that the changes were going to be so dramatic that they could impact the amount of money it generates.