Meta has a long memory when it comes to Snapchat. In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg offered $3 billion to acquire the platform. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel rejected the offer, and by some accounts Zuckerberg took the rejection personally. What followed was more than a decade of systematic feature cloning: Instagram Stories arrived in 2016, Reels was a direct response to TikTok’s rise, and now Meta is trying the disappearing photo trick again, this time as a standalone app.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday that it is testing a new image-sharing app called Instants,<\/a> currently available in Spain and Italy. The app lets users share disappearing photos with friends that can be viewed only once and expire after 24 hours. Photos are captured in a single tap with no editing allowed, and the app does not permit uploads from a camera roll. You shoot it in the app, or you do not share it at all. Users can add text to their photos but cannot modify them any further. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The constraints are the point. Unlike Instagram, which is built around curated and polished content, Instants is designed for quick, real-life snapshots. In Meta’s framing, the product fills a gap created by Instagram’s own success. The main app has become a performance space, a place for brands, influencers, and aspirational content. The casual, throwaway sharing that the platform once encouraged has drifted to private DMs, Stories, or away from Instagram altogether. Instants is the company’s attempt to reclaim that territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An Instagram spokesperson described the initiative as giving people “low-pressure ways to connect with friends,” adding that the company is exploring multiple versions of the app and plans to listen to community feedback. The diplomatic corporate phrasing aside, the product’s DNA is about as subtle as a blue ghost emoji. The app draws directly from Snapchat, Locket, and BeReal in its focus on authentic, ephemeral content. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not the first time Meta has tried to capture this particular market segment within Instagram. Last year, Meta tested a feature called Shots that allowed disappearing photo sharing within the main Instagram app. The feature was also tested under names including “Shots” and “Quicksnap” in select countries before the Instants branding took hold. The move to carve it out as a standalone product reflects a shift in Meta’s product strategy. Rather than piling every experiment into the main Instagram feed, the company has increasingly been willing to let features breathe as separate apps, test them in limited markets, and kill them quietly if the numbers do not hold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The standalone approach also aligns with how Meta now prefers to sequester its short-form experiments rather than risk cluttering or confusing its primary product. Threads was born this way. So were various messaging experiments. The standalone structure gives Meta a clean signal: if Instants works on its own, it has real user intent behind it. If it does not, the main Instagram app is untouched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Users can share Instants with mutual followers or their Close Friends list, and content shared through the standalone app can also be viewed from within the main Instagram app. That interoperability is smart. It means early adopters do not have to choose between platforms, and Instagram’s existing social graph does the heavy lifting that Snapchat required years to build from scratch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The competitive timing is not coincidental. Snapchat’s growth has stalled and has declined in some regions, and Meta may see this as an opportunity to put pressure on the platform in markets where it has not gained a solid foothold. Instagram launching Instants in Spain and Italy, markets where Snapchat’s penetration is modest, is a deliberate choice. It is easier to build habits where the incumbent is weaker, and if the product gains traction there, a broader rollout has a proof-of-concept to point to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The app is available on\u00a0iOS<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Android<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What Instants is really testing, though, is a deeper behavioral question: whether younger users who have developed their social media habits around ephemeral content can be pulled onto Meta’s platform to do it. BeReal tried to own this space with dual-camera authenticity and a randomized notification model. It gained enormous cultural traction in 2022 before struggling with retention. Locket took a narrower approach, building around a home screen widget experience for close relationships. Neither has achieved platform-level scale. Snapchat, despite slowing growth, remains the category’s most durable player, with a core user base that has demonstrated genuine loyalty to the format.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meta’s advantage is distribution. Instagram’s user base dwarfs every competitor in this space, and the Close Friends list feature already has an established audience of people who have opted into more private, intimate sharing. Instants essentially puts a camera and a 24-hour timer on top of that existing behavior and asks whether users will make it a daily habit when it is served through a dedicated app rather than buried in Instagram’s increasingly complex navigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The honest uncertainty is whether the disappearing photo concept has enough standalone gravity to support a separate app in 2026, particularly on a platform whose parent company is simultaneously pushing AI features, Reels, and its own messaging ecosystem. Instagram has many surfaces competing for user attention already. Adding one more requires that Instants find a genuine niche rather than just existing as a checkbox in Meta’s product portfolio. The Spanish and Italian test will tell part of that story. The harder question, about whether Meta can build an authentic sharing culture on top of a platform users associate with performance and curation, is one no A\/B test can fully answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meta has a long memory when it comes to Snapchat. In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg offered $3 billion to acquire the platform. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel rejected the offer, and by some accounts Zuckerberg took the rejection personally. 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