Instagram turned on Reels for everybody this past Wednesday, August 5th, and I've had it sitting in my app for a few days now, tapping into it between other stuff. You've probably seen the little camera icon with the concentric circle logo show up in your own app if you're on iOS or Android. I want to talk about it a bit, not because I think anyone needs another take on "is this just TikTok," but because using it for a few days told me some specific things I didn't expect.
First, the obvious context, and I'll keep this short because everyone and their uncle has written the timeline post already: the current administration has been making noise about banning TikTok outright, there's a September 15th deadline floating around for some kind of forced sale, and Microsoft is apparently in talks. Against that backdrop, Instagram flipping the switch on a 15-second clone feature in over 50 countries at once does not feel like coincidence. It feels like a company that saw a window and drove a truck through it. Fine. Thats just business. I don't really have a hot take on the geopolitics of it, plenty of people do.
What I do have a take on is the actual app.
The interface is doing too much
Instagram already has Feed, Stories, IGTV, Shop, and DMs crammed into one bottom bar, and now theres a Reels tab wedged into the plus button flow along with everything else. When you tap the camera icon you get a menu of about six different capture modes and I genuinely had to squint to find which one was Reels versus which one was a regular Story. This is a UI problem Instagram has been accumulating for two or three years now and Reels just adds another layer on top of it. TikTok, whatever else you want to say about it, opens to exactly one thing: an endless vertical feed of videos. You don't choose a mode. You just watch. That simplicity is the entire product, and Instagram bolting a clone of the creation tool onto an app that already has five other jobs misses the point a little.
The discovery feels thin
I recorded three clips over the weekend just to see how it works (one of my dog refusing to walk past the neighbors trash cans, which, fair, they were loud), and posting is easy enough, the effects and audio library is fine, nothing revolutionary but usable. The problem is what happens after you post. On TikTok the For You page throws your video at strangers almost immediately and the algorithm figures out fast whether anyone cares. On Instagram, my Reels basically just sat there being seen by the same twenty people who already follow me, because right now Reels only really surfaces through your existing followers, your Feed, and a still-pretty-empty Explore tab. Instagram says thats improving. Maybe. But day one, it's a video format bolted onto an existing social graph, not a new discovery engine, and that's a very different product even if the record button looks identical.
I'll also say, and this is a small thing but it bugged me more than it should have: you can't currently share a Reel directly to your Story without it re-exporting weirdly, and one of mine came out cropped wrong on the first try. Small bug, sure, but for a feature this heavily marketed I expected it to be more buttoned up.
None of this means Reels flops. Instagram has over a billion users and Facebook has never been shy about brute-forcing a feature into relevance by just putting it in front of everyone repeatedly until habits form (this is basically how Stories itself won, lets be honest). Given enough time and enough algorithm tuning I'd bet Reels ends up a real fixture in the app, TikTok ban or no TikTok ban. But right now, three days in, it feels like an app doing its homework rather than an app anyone particularly wanted. I'll keep messing with it and see if that changes. My dog, for what its worth, remains unimpressed by both the trash cans and my content strategy.