The battle for dominance in the social media sphere continues to intensify as new platforms enter the arena and existing ones are adding new features to attract and retain more users. Meta-owned social media platforms Instagram and Facebook are among the latter, and now, Instagram is testing a new full-screen mode for its feed and an updated navigation bar.
For Instagram users, this will make their experience on the platform better and more engaging as they can discover new and exciting content more easily. This new and immersive full-screen feed looks to improve the way images show up. This will also help Instagram recommend to users who do not follow them — something that is similar to TikTok’s “For You” offering.
The same was announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an Instagram Stories, where he wrote that the company wanted to make things easier for users to discover content and connect with their friends. For now, this test will be rolled out to a limited number of people “soon.”
If you are lucky enough to be part of the select number of people, then you will be able to see videos almost entirely full screen while scrolling through your feed and see the navigation bar appear underneath them the content. The Instagram logo and other top buttons remain at the top.
This sounds eerily similar to what TikTok offers to its considerable user base, and it would not be the first time social media platforms have developed new products or features to compete with the Chinese upstart, which had been a fast hit when it rolled out. This is how Facebook and Instagram’s Reels were born, after all.
With over 1.4 billion users across the globe, Instagram is one of the top social media platforms of the day, but it has had its own struggles and criticisms. It remains to be seen whether the new full-screen feed and an updated navigation bar at the bottom of the Instagram app (where shortcuts will be added for creating posts and accessing messages) are successful or not.
Because according to some of the replies on Instagram’s tweet on the development (which was basically just sharing a screenshot of Zuckerberg’s Story), several users are not looking forward to having this feature.
This development comes a month after Instagram had started experimenting with a full-screen feed. Last month, it started working on a similar feature where feed posts did not extend all the way to the top of the screen, although it was not well-met by users.
