Instagram’s new Threads app for iOS is now available with its first update, bringing a number of minor improvements and tweaks, extra functionality, and other bug fixes, including compatibility for the recently released iOS 17 public beta. This comes only five days after it reached 100 million users worldwide.
Cameron Roth, a software engineer for Instagram, posted the update’s news on Threads. A crucial update is the ability to run the app on iOS 17 without it crashing, which is happily one of the features and changes he listed for the latest edition.
Among other planned updates, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has stated that a chronological feed, an edit button, support for multiple accounts, and the ability to search posts are among the smaller quality-of-life enhancements that are in the works.
Instead, the app update adds features like the ability to expand photos on profiles and double-tap the search tab to start a search.
It also supports extra tall photos and makes them fully viewable, as well as 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.
For instance, strange images on the threadline (Threads’ term for the timeline) have been fixed, and profiles now handle scroll dismiss better in Threads.
Roth pointed out that it has also corrected some lesser flaws. He stated that the app’s binary size has also been reduced.
The engineer responded to other comments from users asking about features they’d like to see by saying that alt text, an accessibility feature for users with low vision and blindness that adds text to describe photos, would be coming soon and that being able to see an indicator of whether you are following someone in your followers section would be coming the following week. As Mosseri had previously stated, he also reaffirmed Threads’ ambitions to provide a following feed and mentioned that the app’s primary algorithm was also receiving “continuous improvements” in addition to other accessibility-related areas.
When someone complained about Threads not having a desktop version that could be accessed using a web browser, for example, Roth said that it’s not as simple as “turning it on.”
He declared, “It didn’t exist and needs to be built.” So, for the time being, it appears that change is still in the future.
Meta wanted to take advantage of the chaos at Twitter, which was driving users away from the Elon Musk-owned social network once more after he implemented limits on the number of viewable tweets, claiming the reduction was required due to an increase in data scraping activity.
This is why Threads was launched while it was still a work-in-progress. (The amount of scraping had increased as a result of Musk raising the cost of Twitter’s API, which prevented some developers from paying for Twitter’s data in a timely manner.)
As a result, various Twitter alternatives gained popularity. One such competitor is Mastodon, a decentralized version of Twitter, which showed a surge in monthly active users from 1.4 million to 1.9 million as of June 11.
The CEO and founder of Masoton, Eugen Rochko, made a comment about the growth in early July, saying that posting activity had tripled and active users had increased by 294K over the weekend. He promoted an article yesterday that indicated Mastodon has reached 2 million monthly active users, suggesting that the exodus from Twitter is still going on.
In the future, Threads intends to link with ActivityPub, a decentralized social networking protocol, enabling users to engage with and follow other Mastodon users as well as move their profiles from Threads to other ActivityPub-connected servers.
Meanwhile, Twitter has reacted angrily to claims of traffic decreases, with new CEO Linda Yaccarino asserting—without providing any supporting data—that last week had its highest usage day
