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Snapchat fixed the most annoying thing about watching stories

Until Tuesday, Snapchat had a tapping problem.

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To watch stories from your friends in the app, you had to tap on their profiles. When a story was finished, you were taken back to your list of friends and forced to tap again. Rinse and repeat.

With a big update on Tuesday, Snapchat has introduced a new way of watching stories. It's brilliant and requires much less tapping.

Screen Shot 2016 03 29 at 5.25.27 PM
It's easier than ever to go from DJ Khaled's snaps to my colleague Paul's. Tech Insider

Simply tap on the first story in your feed and Snapchat will automatically play the next one once it's finished. You can still tap to skip individual parts of a story or swipe to skip the rest of a person's story entirely. But if you don't skip anything, you can effectively watch every story in your feed with just one tap.

This may not sound like a monumental change, and it isn't if you don't use Snapchat regularly. Frequent users, however, despise tapping in and out of stories. This small change makes all the difference.

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It doesn't help that Snapchat only downloads three stories at a time, which means that if you wanted to watch them out of order you had to tap each thumbnail to start downloading a story and then tap again to watch it. So much tapping!

Now you can just tap the first, most recent story in your feed and sit through them all. It's a more casual, lean-back experience that feels like you're channel surfing through different peoples' perspectives.

Tuesday's update to Snapchat also includes new ways to send audio and video messages along with some other easter eggs.

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