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Like Facebook continues its strategy to consolidate more of the background of its different applications on a single platform, which also gives it a bit of simplicity and management. In the coming month, it will close Direct, the standalone Instagram account. direct messaging application tested to compete with Snapchat, on iOS and Android. Instead, Facebook and its Instagram team will channel all developments and activities into the direct messaging feature of the main Instagram application.
We first saw a message about closing the app via a tweet from the direct user Matt Navarra: "In the coming month, we will no longer support the Direct application," says Instagram in the application itself. "Your conversations will automatically switch to Instagram, so you have nothing to do."
The details were then confirmed by Instagram itself:
"We are canceling the standalone Autonomous standalone test," said a spokesman in a statement sent to TechCrunch. "We are focused on continuing to make Instagram Direct the best place for pleasant conversations with your friends."
From what we understand, Instagram will continue to develop Direct features – they will no longer live in a standalone application. (The tests and deployments of new features reported previously include encryption in direct messaging, the ability to watch videos with other people, a web version of the direct messaging feature,
Instagram gave no reason for its decision, but in many ways, the writing was hanging on the wall with it.
The application first appeared in December 2017, when Instagram confirmed that it had deployed it in a small number of markets – Uruguay, Chile, Turkey, Italy, Portugal and Israel – as a test. (Instagram first launched direct messaging in the main application in 2013.)
"We want Instagram to be a place for all your moments, and private sharing with close friends is an important part of it," he said at the time. "To make the connection that way easier and more fun, we're starting to test Direct, an innovative app that seamlessly connects to Instagram."
But we do not know how many markets beyond have finally had access to the app, although Instagram has expanded it to a larger number. The iOS version currently indicates that it is available in more languages than Spanish, Turkish, Italian and Portuguese. It also includes English, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
But Instagram has done little to actively promote the app or expand into more markets, so Direct never really found much traction in the markets where it was active.
The only countries in the AppAnnie for Direct ranking are Uruguay for Android, where it was recently ranked 55th in social networking applications (without figures for the overall rankings, which means that was too low to be counted); and Portugal on iOS, where he was number 24 among social apps and a derisory total of 448.
The Direct app has not been updated on iOS since the end of December, although the Android version was updated recently at the end of April.
At the time of its initial launch as a test, however, Direct seemed to be an interesting initiative of Instagram.
The company was already publishing various other features that cloned Snapchat's popular features. The explosive growth and attraction of one of them, Stories, could have given Facebook the impression that there was still much to be done to create more Snapchat-like experiences for its audience. More generally, the rise of direct messaging and Snapchat applications such as WhatsApp has shown that there is a market demand for more applications based on private conversations between small groups or even topping up -headed.
In addition, the creation of a standalone email application takes a page from Facebook's application development book, in which it was launched and actually began to accelerate the development of a separate Messenger application from the Facebook experience. on mobile.
The company has not revealed any recent figures regarding the use of Direct since 2017, when 375 million users of the service were collected, which allowed for the grouping of permanent and ephemeral messages ( endangered) within the service.
More recently, Instagram and Facebook have themselves been part of the in-depth review we've seen about how social platforms manage the police and moderate harmful or offensive content. Some have themselves criticized the proposed reconciliation of its disparate application ecosystem, especially because Facebook does not give applications such as WhatsApp and Instagram sufficient autonomy to become even bigger. Data monster in the process.
Perhaps it was the depressing use that finally killed Direct, but I was arguing that the optics to promote the extension of its application on another platform was not particularly strong either.
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