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QUIC at Snapchat

eng.snap.com

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Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#31

Post by habibur »

capableweb wrote: post #26
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, this seems objectively bonkers, but on the other hand, I can kind of see how it'd make sense. If everybody using Snap uses a phone, and all the phones have more or less similar resolutions, and Snap doesn't allow any sort of zooming, then really the pixels on the original screen are exactly what you need, so why bother taking a new, different picture? I'm pretty sure I can answer that question (becau…

> I'd love to know the actual reasoning behind this. Maybe there was some weird permissions issue between displaying what the camera sees and "taking photos" that affected some users at some point? My bet is on that it's simply faster to take a screenshot of the viewfinder of the camera than using the camera to take a photo. Open up the camera already has some delay, taking photos introduces more delay before you get…

And my bet will be that they wanted to keep user's expectation of what he/she is sharing vs what actually is getting shared as close as possible.

A simple user believes he is sharing a screen resolution image and there's no hidden details in it.

Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#32

Post by sofixa »

rvz wrote: post #28
tayo42 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow that's surprising, and it looks like its a by a good amount of people. I feel like snapchat is thought of as a dying company and twitter seems to be known by everyone. Though I get the feeling most people don't think twitter is a place for them to participate in, them being regular people.

Maybe Twitter has more bots on the platform than real users, which is why Snap is still alive. Given they are a $100B dollar company, they are far from 'dying'.

> Given they are a $100B dollar company, they are far from 'dying'.

Meh, valuation isn't everything. Uber and WeWork also have high valuations, little tangible assets, but are bleeding money and have no clear path to profitability.

Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#33

Post by solarkraft »

howolduis wrote: post #11

Snaps speed? How about you actually use the camera on android phones?? snapchat doesn't even USE the camera on Android phones. Instead, it takes a screenshot of the screen, resulting ina terrible quality. It's really embarrassing that they're still doing this for a company this big...

The reason is fairly simple. Most phones have a slight to extreme (on the order of seconds) delay taking photos. Snaps are about moments. Instagram takes an actual photo and it often results in much worse photos (the picture quality is better, the moment often missed).

I'm not sure about this, but I think I remember Snapchat even having implemented actual photo taking and being frustrated about it. Of course a reasonable compromise would be letting users choose, but it seems like that's just not trendy enough.

Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#34

Post by AgentME »

KaiserPro wrote: post #27

I know they are comparing to HTTP2, but objectively HTTP2 was never a great fit for mobile. I know its not the case, but when HTTP2 was being developed it felt like they were only thinking about users with strong wifi and zero packet loss. My company had a number of reps at the W3C, whenever I raised concerns with them I was told that I was being an old sysadmin, and that tcp doesn't work the way I think it does. The…

QUIC has the solution to the issue you brought up with HTTP2: packet loss no longer causes all of the multiplexed streams to be interrupted, but without the costs of using many simultaneous TCP connections.

Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#35

Post by londons_explore »

solarkraft wrote: post #33
howolduis wrote: post #11

Snaps speed? How about you actually use the camera on android phones?? snapchat doesn't even USE the camera on Android phones. Instead, it takes a screenshot of the screen, resulting ina terrible quality. It's really embarrassing that they're still doing this for a company this big...

The reason is fairly simple. Most phones have a slight to extreme (on the order of seconds) delay taking photos. Snaps are about moments. Instagram takes an actual photo and it often results in much worse photos (the picture quality is better, the moment often missed). I'm not sure about this, but I think I remember Snapchat even having implemented actual photo taking and being frustrated about it. Of course a reason…

A lot of android phones have a manufacturer provided camera app which has special abilities - for example, it uses private API's to adjust focus, do zero shutter delay capturing, select which camera to use on 'quad camera' phones, do 'auto expose on faces in the scene', do various HDR in signal processing hardware that regular apps don't have access to, etc.

Any app which just uses the android camera API doesn't have access to this stuff - and usually ends up with very poor quality images as a result. On my phone, apps that use the android API can't adjust focus at all, which makes even things like a barcode scanning app useless. Things that say "please take a photo of your ID card in this box" are unusable!

Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#36

Post by rvz »

sofixa wrote: post #32
rvz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Twitter has more bots on the platform than real users, which is why Snap is still alive. Given they are a $100B dollar company, they are far from 'dying'.

> Given they are a $100B dollar company, they are far from 'dying'. Meh, valuation isn't everything. Uber and WeWork also have high valuations, little tangible assets, but are bleeding money and have no clear path to profitability.

Somehow they have more REAL daily active users (DAU) (not bots) than Twitter, twice as valuable than them and have already expanded out from being just an app but have an ecosystem of integrations in other apps and are still alive after being copied everywhere.

Whereas the HN crowd 'thought' they either shut down or got acquired. As always, they 'thought' wrong. Again.

It's hard to grasp the reality check here but they are far from 'dying'.

Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#37

Post by badwolf »

capableweb wrote: post #26
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, this seems objectively bonkers, but on the other hand, I can kind of see how it'd make sense. If everybody using Snap uses a phone, and all the phones have more or less similar resolutions, and Snap doesn't allow any sort of zooming, then really the pixels on the original screen are exactly what you need, so why bother taking a new, different picture? I'm pretty sure I can answer that question (becau…

> I'd love to know the actual reasoning behind this. Maybe there was some weird permissions issue between displaying what the camera sees and "taking photos" that affected some users at some point? My bet is on that it's simply faster to take a screenshot of the viewfinder of the camera than using the camera to take a photo. Open up the camera already has some delay, taking photos introduces more delay before you get…

>videos, which I'm sure they are using the actual camera

This is why when you start recording a video on Snapchat, there's a delay before the recording starts, and usually also a short delay before audio recording starts (especially noticeable if you have audio playing from your phone at the same time)

Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#38

Post by greysonp »

howolduis wrote: post #11

Snaps speed? How about you actually use the camera on android phones?? snapchat doesn't even USE the camera on Android phones. Instead, it takes a screenshot of the screen, resulting ina terrible quality. It's really embarrassing that they're still doing this for a company this big...

Former Snap employee here (albeit 3 years ago). They care a lot about their camera, particularly speed. They do, in fact, use the "proper" camera APIs on the devices where it's fast enough, and they'll hide the latency by using a screenshot first and then subbing in the higher quality image later. But at the time this was only done for whitelisted devices that could do this operation fast enough. A lot of devices have very slow cameras.

You might disagree with how they weigh speed vs quality, but I assure you they take it very seriously.

Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#39

Post by speedgoose »

greysonp wrote: post #38
howolduis wrote: post #11

Snaps speed? How about you actually use the camera on android phones?? snapchat doesn't even USE the camera on Android phones. Instead, it takes a screenshot of the screen, resulting ina terrible quality. It's really embarrassing that they're still doing this for a company this big...

Former Snap employee here (albeit 3 years ago). They care a lot about their camera, particularly speed. They do, in fact, use the "proper" camera APIs on the devices where it's fast enough, and they'll hide the latency by using a screenshot first and then subbing in the higher quality image later. But at the time this was only done for whitelisted devices that could do this operation fast enough. A lot of devices hav…

Thanks for the explanation. My Huawei had the best camera of the market when it was released, but it is obviously not whitelisted. I guess it's difficult to test a Huawei in USA.

Re: QUIC at Snapchat

#40

Post by whynotminot »

speedgoose wrote: post #39
greysonp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Snap employee here (albeit 3 years ago). They care a lot about their camera, particularly speed. They do, in fact, use the "proper" camera APIs on the devices where it's fast enough, and they'll hide the latency by using a screenshot first and then subbing in the higher quality image later. But at the time this was only done for whitelisted devices that could do this operation fast enough. A lot of devices hav…

Thanks for the explanation. My Huawei had the best camera of the market when it was released, but it is obviously not whitelisted. I guess it's difficult to test a Huawei in USA.

What does “best camera” mean though? Sounds like the poster is talking more about latency and speed than quality, which may be more about the CPU/OS optimization than the camera image quality.
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