Instagram, yesterday confirms a bug mistakenly launched a change to its feed. This change replaced the usual scrolling with a new ‘horizontal tap-to-advance’, like with Stories. This did not go down well with most users as they immediately complained that the gesture is awkward and annoying.
The change generated a widespread outrage among users on Twitter, with several likening it to Snapchat’s unpopular redesign. “The Instagram update is so trash it’s worse than the Snapchat update,” @samfloresxo tweeted.
The company was testing the feature with a small part of users, but the bug triggered a much broader rollout to a few orders of magnitude beyond the ones planned, says the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri.
The Tap-to-advance feature sees users tapping the sides of the screen instead of scrolling up and down with their finger to advance forwards and backwards between posts. This also means users always see media full-screen rather than having to adjust the view with a finger scroll to see the entire post. This feature was first used by Snapchat.
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The redesigned Snapchat app has fought to attract extra users since its roll-out last year and newer versions have been criticized for being too confusing.
I have the new Instagram horizontal scroll interface. I’m sure this will not be met with any backlash WHATSOEVER. But seems maybe intended to reduce mindless vertical scrolling? cc @mosseri comments at the end 😭 pic.twitter.com/fwmtbfjFaf
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) December 27, 2018
Instagram Back to Normal
The photo-sharing social network said it has fixed the bug that led to a temporary change in the appearance of its feed.
Instagram spokesperson says, “Due to a bug, some users saw a change to the way their feed appears today. We quickly fixed the issue and feed is back to normal. We apologize for any confusion,” The company confirms it’s still testing the navigation style in Explore.
Instagram may introduce tap-to-advance to the main feed in the future, but with the angry responses of the users, it may be sceptical about releasing the features anytime soon.