Instagram Discontinues Its Boomerang and Hyperlapse Standalone Apps
- Instagram's Boomerang and Hyperlapse apps were removed from the Play Store and App Store on March 1.
- The platform took this decision to improve and focus on the main app.
- Nevertheless, Boomerang’s features will continue to be supported on Instagram.
Instagram has removed its Hyperlapse and Boomerang apps from the Google and Apple app stores. This move comes just a week after the social media platform shut down its IGTV app. Instagram's main motive behind pulling down these standalone apps is to invest more time and energy into the primary app and other initiatives, like Reels.
Hyperlapse is a timelapse video application launched in 2014, and Boomerang is a looping video application launched in 2015. According to data provided by Apptopia, Instagram shut down these two apps on the same day as the IGTV app (March 1, 2022). The company did not formally announce the removals on its official blog post, but social media consultant Matt Navarra tweeted about it recently.
Boomerang was way more popular out of the two, with 301 million lifetime global downloads. In comparison, Hyperlapse only had 23 million. Even at the time of removal from the app store, Boomerage averaged 26,000 downloads in a day. It was available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, while Hyperlapse was available only on iOS.
The social media platform has integrated many features of its standalone apps on the main app. For example, users can create Boomerangs on Instagram, so a separate app becomes redundant. Boomerang's features will continue to be supported in the app, and Instagram confirmed it would not remove the Layout app, which lets users organize photos into collages.
When it confirmed the IGTV shutdown, the social media giant said it wanted discovering and creating videos to be as simple as possible. Arguably, this all started when Facebook's Instagram decided to get rid of its special IGTV format after realizing it didn't yield the expected results.
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