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16 Ugly Bugs Snap Didn’t Bother To Fix For Snap Kit And Lessons They Teach

Published Sep 25, 2018
16 Ugly Bugs Snap Didn’t Bother To Fix For Snap Kit And Lessons They Teach

Snap has many business problems, including the poor rollout of Snap Kit SDK.
I’m an iOS Hobbyist developer using Swift 4 and iOS 12 and have been working with Snap Kit now for many months. With over 10 Medium posts, I have been chronicling my struggles and victories with the SDK. I have run into a number of problems.

Snapchat Snap Kit SDK Primer

Snap Kit is Snap’s attempt to go beyond its primary app offering. To grow and stay relevant, Snap login must be as prevalent as Facebook, Twitter, or Google’s authentication on Apps. GIFY has inserted itself into many other apps and Snap has the opportunity to do the same thing with AR content, Stories, Lenses, and Filters.

Snap Kit SDK is Snap’s attempt to become sticky.

The bugs described are purposefully written in “Bug Style” with the hope that each will actually get filed against Snap Kit SDK for Snapchat App

Some of the bugs documented below are nit-picky, however, Snap is in no position to allow even the slightest developer friction to occur. Snap’s future is partly riding on the success of Snap Kit, and the business has very little wiggle room to get things wrong. Winning over the developer community is paramount to Snap Kit SDK adoption.

Also, some of these could be considered feature requests, documentation requests or things that are “not bugs”. As someone with 20 years of software industry experience, I say these are “FAILURES” that need to be addressed (aka Bugs).

Business Lessons

For each of the bugs, I have added advice on improving the business approach to software release

Bugs

1 — Single Point Of Support

Steps To Reproduce

  1. Go to https://docs.snapchat.com/docs/
  2. Note the text

Feedback?

We regularly update our documentation to give you everything you need for creative, easy integrations. If something’s not working for you, please report it to snapkit-support@snap.com.
Automated response text says:

Hi there!” Learn more about Snap Kit by visiting support.snapchat.com/news/snapkit. If you have further questions please reach out to us at support.snapchat.com/i-need-help. Thanks!

There are a few issues with the automated response:

  • Tells the customer who is seeking customer support to look at the news blog. The news blog is not designed as a customer support tool.

  • Tells the customer if they need further assistance to go to “I need help”. This part of the Snapchat website is not designed to deliver developer nor customer facing support for Snap Kit. A look at that URL will show that there is no way to report a specific Snap Kit SDK issue and the user will feel like anything they report there will end up in a black hole.

  • The automated response does not say that anyone will actually read the email the customer sent nor help. It only talks about where to go and what to read. It is far from customer friendly.

Suggested Mitigation

Reword the automated response:

Thank you for contacting Snap Kit Support. This automated response is to let you know we received your request and will be reaching out to you shortly
Business Lesson

When introducing a product that is outside current offerings, review all customer engagement vectors. Staff appropriately. Involve Quality Assurance and Technical Support from the start (involve all stakeholders)

Read the rest on medium

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