Exploratory UI. Teenagers can figure it out, but their parents sure can't.

Asking genuinely here, but what exactly is 'convoluted' about it for you individually?

Here are a few things that I experience on android.

-When snapchat is foregrounded my phone wont go to sleep.

-Sometimes the camera will just go black, hang, and crash the entire app. I don't know why, im guessing it could be filters.

-Taking a snap with a filter applied sometimes just takes the photo without the filter.

-The memories section is useless, and seems to only exist to keep pictures out of my freely accessible storage.

-Adding things to the images like text or smilies is okay for a single item, multiple things on an image becomes very cumbersome with you resizing things you didnt want to resize.

-the main inbox screen is very cumbersome, tap views a snap, sometimes it lags, and i tap again, only for it to show me a snap for less than a second and disappear. Double tap replys if you just viewed a snap, If you don't double tap perfectly it may think you want to swipe right to chat.

-Inbox keeps getting slower, I get instant push notifications and tap one to go to my inbox, only to wait 2-3 seconds for the inbox to update, sometimes on top of that it hasn't even received the data and i hate to wait for that too.

-Chat and text messages are stupid, You will lose messages because you swipe back to your feed the exact time someone sends you a new message, and kaput the text is gone forever, sometimes messages stay and sometimes they don't and i cant figure out why. I used video chat once and it was a horrible and laggy experience, one which i've never tried again.

-Stories are starting to add ads, which i understand, but the comic event where "the ads load faster than the real content" happens.

-If a story hasn't downloaded the next snap, the app just stops responding until it is downloaded and ready. Most of the time it will register any tap in that frozen state and will skip the snap when the picture/video is finally loaded.

-a few controls like text/drawing color are 1-2 millimeters wide on some phones and makes selecting them infuriating.

I would second that question. I just tried and it takes exactly 4 taps to capture and send a photo or video to someone else on Snapchat for Android (I'm fairly certain the UI is the same on iOS).

So I launch the app. Top left button makes sense, it turns the flash on and off. Top button.... unsure, it's a ghost? Some kind of menu? So I push it, am given a screen with a help button, a picture of a trophy, and a settings icon. Looks like this is the app's "system menu" but also the place where I can managed friends, that makes sense then. Pop back down to main screen, Bottom left looks like messages, so I push that and... it's a massive, unsortable list. I scroll down and see all sorts of different icons. Probably the non-filled icons means the content is "read" but there's a red square, a purple square, a blue square with a triangle (probably chat yea?), a grey arrow, a red arrow. Some filled in, some not, totally unsorted, and it looks like message send/receives are mixed in with "new friend added" messages. So that's a mess.

So now I pop into the mysterious "pyramid of three little circles" menu. It's.. news? "Recent updates" is another list of... friend... stuff... probably Snapchat's answer to Instagram Stories or whatever. More mysterious icons in the top right (other than search, that's obvious).

When I take a picture there's an x (obvious), a postit note, a T (obvious), a... pencil (pretty obvious if so), a timer, a download icon, and a square with a plus (no idea). Also a "send" icon. Throughout all this navigation, I'm lagging, hanging, etc.

Use case: A coworker says "add me on snapchat, here I've got my QR code open on my phone." Starting from the main menu I enter the "settings", click "add friends." "Add by Snapcode" looks right, oh, no, I need to take a photo, it won't actively scan for QR.

Things like that.