Instagram Threads update – After topping 100 million users just five days after its public launch, the newborn Instagram Threads app continues to blaze hotter as it is out now with its first update for iOS, featuring a handful of minor changes and modifications, added features, and various bug fixes, including compatibility for the recently released iOS 17 public beta.
Cameron Roth, an Instagram development engineer, announced the app’s update on Threads. He provided a list of the new features and adjustments, which happily includes the ability to run the app on iOS 17 without it crashing – an essential update.
Other updates are minor quality-of-life updates rather than big features such as the addition of a chronological feed, an edit button, multiple account support, or the ability to search posts, among other planned upgrades announced by Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri.
Instead, the app update adds features such as the ability to double-tap the search tab to start a search and expand photos on profiles, as well as support for extra tall photos that are fully viewable, a newly polished “facepill pill” (the display of a list of people that appears at the top of the screen when there are new posts to read), and bug fixes. Threads, for example, now has improved scroll dismiss handling on profiles as well as adjustments to random images on the threadline (Threads’ term for the timeline). Other, minor issues have also been addressed, according to Roth. He also mentioned that the app’s binary size has been reduced.
Also, see: Best Electric Chopper Bikes 2023
In response to other users’ questions about features they’d like to see, the engineer said alt text — an accessibility feature for low vision and blind users that adds text to describe photos would be coming soon, and the ability to see an indicator of whether you’re following someone in your follower’s section would be coming next week. He also confirmed Threads’ plans to provide a following feed, as Mosseri had previously stated, and highlighted that “continuous improvements” were being made in other areas of accessibility as well as the app’s core algorithm.
In response to a complaint about the lack of a desktop version — where Threads might be used through a web browser, for example — Roth said it’s not as simple as “turning it on.”
“It didn’t exist and needs to be built,” he explained. So, for the time being, that modification appears to be further down the line.
Threads was launched while it was still in development because Meta wanted to capitalize on the chaos at Twitter, which was sending users fleeing once again after Elon Musk implemented limits on the number of viewable tweets, claiming the reduction was necessary due to an increase in data scraping activity. (The scraping had escalated because Musk raised Twitter’s API fee, leaving some developers unable to properly pay for Twitter’s data.)
As a result, other Twitter alternatives gained traction, such as decentralized Twitter rival Mastodon, which increased its monthly active users from 1.4 million in early June to 1.9 million as of June 11. Masoton founder and CEO Eugen Rochko reacted on the rise in early July, stating that active users had increased by 294K over the weekend and posting activity had tripled. Yesterday, he boosted a post announcing Mastodon had reached 2 million monthly active users, implying that the Twitter exodus is still ongoing.
Threads, like Mastodon, intends to interface with the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub in the future, allowing users to move their profiles from Threads to other ActivityPub-connected servers as well as engage with and follow other Mastodon users.
Meanwhile, Twitter has reacted to allegations of traffic losses, with new CEO Linda Yaccarino saying, without providing figures, that Twitter had its highest usage day since February last week.
