Instagram is reportedly releasing a brand new design today that is said to prioritize Reels and according to an article by Buzzfeed, it's a "TikTok clone." The Reels feature will be put in the center front. The new layout will see the Reels icon, represented by a movie clapper, in the bottom center of the app where the previous upload photo button used to be.
New redesign puts "Reels" in the center
Next to the said Reels will be a shopping icon which is quite new for the app. Both notifications as well as the upload button will now be moved to the corner at the top of the app itself. With the new rearrangement, users will see how Instagram prioritizes different things.
Reels was previously launched some time in August to be the app's way of competing with TikTok just a month after Facebook had allegedly quietly killed the previous TikTok clone called Lasso. This was hardly the first time ever that Facebook resorted to clone one of its competitors.
Facebook's similar features to other apps
When Snapchat previously started to take off back in 2013, Facebook then launched a feature called "Poke" which is an ephemeral messaging clone. Facebook then allegedly copied the really popular Stories format that was mostly used on Instagram.
TikTok, on the other hand, poses quite a threat to Facebook, which now owns Instagram. TikTok has gained popularity really quick among younger users along with the number of memes and TikTok stars it has generated in order to keep people mainly engaged with the said app for a number of hours.
"Reels" has not yet taken off
So far, Reels has not yet been able to catch up on popularity and when checking out Reels, most people see content with a lot of TikTok watermarks all around. This signifies that a lot of the Reels content was just reuploaded coming from TikTok.
In Instagram's new redesign, the Reels part gets its very own version of the popular TikTok "for you" segment. Previously, the Reels post could be immediately found on the app's Explore page or directly in users' Feed if someone had posted it. As of the moment, the said Reels button directly takes users to a particular feed that mixes of the different people that the user follows and the content surfaced.
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TikTok is still going strong
The known Instagram app, however, is still pretty much conservative when it comes to big design or different feature changes. This is compared to the main app Facebook. Most of the time, major redesigns don't usually happen and in general, it's actually pretty minimal on different features.
The fact that the recent redesign focuses on the brand new Reels feature actually suggests that Facebook is really trying to compete with TikTok. Despite the legal battle that TikTok had to go through, it seems like the app hasn't been severely affected still holding quite a number of users.
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This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
