By: Nick Gambino
It looks like Instagram is considering spinning off their Reels feature into its very own standalone app. If TikTok ends up banned in the U.S., a separate Reels app would fill the void.
We don’t have a lot of info on how serious or far along in the process this is. This comes from a source who possibly works somewhere in the Meta umbrella and heard the Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, mention it. The anonymous source spilled the beans to The Information.
They’re calling it Project Ray which is curious as Meta has a partnership with Ray-Ban where they’ve created AI glasses. Though this may just be a red herring of a name to throw people off the scent.
If they do decide to spin off into a separate Reels app we can expect a bunch of new features. It’ll most likely be a lot like TikTok. While Reels as a feature inside of Instagram has been popular, it’s still just a singular feature. A bottom-up app opens them up to a whole world of possibilities – longer videos, stronger recommendations, a Reels shop and a lot more.
This might be necessary in order to combat a bloated Instagram. With Reels, Stories, posts, photos, videos, it’s getting a bit unwieldy. Gone are the days when you’d get a simple chronological feed filled with photos from the people you follow. The majority of my feed just resembles my FYP.
As for the future of TikTok, we still don’t know where that’s going to go. Biden banned the app, but on the eve of the shuttering, Trump granted a 75-day extension. In that time they presumably still have to either sell it or shut down.
They might be able to work out a deal where parent company ByteDance retains 50% of the company. If they go with that, they’re really going to have to put up some assurances that the China government won’t be able to access digital information on U.S. citizens. After all, that’s the whole reason the ban was issued.
