If you are an active user and use story feature frequently, you can easily see the difference in story image and video quality. If you are a tech enthusiast, you have probably noticed that the quality of Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media app stories is very high quality and crispy on iPhones and very bad and low on Android resolved (even if you’re using a $1000 app). flagship Android phone like Samsung Galaxy S20).
It’s hard to find a good answer to this problem on the web, so I figured why not share the real reason for low resolution social media stories on Android.
So why do Stories on Android look poor quality?
If you look at the flagship Android phones these days, they all come with a very high quality and powerful camera sensor. Just take a look at the flagship smartphones from Samsung, Google and Huawei. They all have very powerful camera sensors and can take very high quality and crisp photos with the help of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning, but when the same smartphones get to the quality of social media apps, their image and video quality changes very badly out.
Also, so many people who switched from iPhone to Android felt that the overall application experience on Android is not very good compared to iPhone.
The real reason behind this problem is that tons of Android smartphones are released every year. When I talk about the Android smartphones launched in 2019, it is more than 1500 smartphones. All have different screen sizes (aspect ratios) and different hardware specifications. So when it comes to hardware and software optimization, it is very difficult for developers to optimize their applications for each individual device.
Let’s take an example of Instagram stories. When you open your Stories screen and try to take a photo or video. Instagram on Android doesn’t use device camera hardware to capture the view, it actually records the view on the screen. For example, when you capture a still image, the Instagram story camera actually took a screenshot of the screen view instead of using the actual camera hardware. Because of this, Stories on Instagram and other social media apps have poor quality.
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Now the question arises why companies like Instagram can’t fix this problem?
The reason behind this problem is, as I mentioned above, there are hundreds of Android smartphones in the market with different screen sizes and different camera hardware. So when Instagram adds code for every available device in the market in their app, they have to add more than 1000 lines of code.
To solve this problem, Instagram and other social media apps follow the same process, simply recording the camera view on the screen instead of using the actual hardware.
Now many people will ask why there is disparity between android apps and iphone apps and why iphone apps use real hardware instead of using the same process that developers use for android apps.
The reason is:
There have been a total of 28 iPhones since the launch of the iPhone 2G, and if we look at the iPhone with the latest software support, it’s probably very few. If I’m not mistaken, the iPhone 5s is the last iPhone to support the latest version of applications. There are a total of 8 iPhones from 5s to 11 pro max that support the latest versions of applications.
Therefore, it is much easier for developers to develop their apps for fewer devices and this is the main reason applications on iPhones are much more optimized than on any Android smartphone on the market.
