Taking the easy route was OK when they were a scrappy startup, but now that they are a multi-billion public company, I honestly don't see why they can't hire a couple of qualified Android devs to fix this.
It's never really about the devs. It's about creating buy-in from management to support the work that needs to be done. You'll be hard-pressed to find leadership that is generally willing to re-architect/re-engineer apps from scratch without significant pressure from somewhere else in the org other than engineering.
Technical debt is always the last concern in the product. But for once, it's manifesting itself as a real user-facing problem which was acknowledged in the last SNAP earnings call for the Android app.
Doesn't Instagram use the same approach on their Stories Camera on Android? Seems more of an issue with Android Camera performance/APIs than an engineering critique.
