Wait, Instagram actually has a stand-alone Direct Messaging app? You’ll be forgiven for not knowing that they do have it since it never really took off or even got to other territories. And it looks like you won’t get to see it at all as they have now sent notifications to their existing beta users that they will be discontinuing support for the Direct app. There was no reason given for this but given that there were not that many users, it shouldn’t be an issue for them.
According to Engadget, the few who were actually using the Direct for Instagram app received a notification that the app will not receive support anymore in the coming month. The good thing about this, aside from the fact that people won’t mourn this short-lived app, is that you don’t need to do anything since your conversations will still be over there in your main Instagram app. Nothing will be affected and no chats or attachments will be lost.
Direct was introduced back in 2017 but was only available in very selected countries. While they did add some features every once in a while like the ability to add GIPHY GIFs and also introducing a web version for your laptop or desktop, it never got out of the beta stage. And of course since the territories it was available in were several limited, there wasn’t much buzz about it.
Why they’re discontinuing the app is not clear at this point. Either the app did not get much traction (which was their fault mostly because of reasons stated above) or they realized there was really no need to have another messaging app when their own products like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are already very popular and are robust enough.
The loss of the Direct for Instagram app isn’t a really big loss after all. It’s just another lesson that you don’t need to fix or add to something that isn’t broken.
https://twitter.com/MattNavarra/status/1128875881462677504/photo/1
