Instagram announces Android to get offline mode

Reaching out to Instagram users with limited network connectivity or those without data plans, the social network is bringing offline support for its Android app as announced at Facebook's F8 developer conference. They started with Android first as it’s considered the preferred type of device in the developing world. According to Tech Crunch, Instagram is exploring the possibility of bringing it to iOS, too.

In offline mode, you will be able to see previously loaded content in your feed, profiles you visited before and old versions of the Explore tab will be visible, too. You’ll be able to leave comments, like photos, unfollow people, or save media. All these actions will then be carried over once you reconnect.

Instagram takes cues from Pinterest with new feature called Collections

If you’ve been saving random photos on Instagram haphazardly, the social network now wants to help you organize them with a new feature. Called Collections, you can now organize your saved posts in a way that makes sense to you. It’s rather similar to how Pinterest does things. But instead of collecting everything you find online, this is limited to what you find on Instagram and these collections are kept private so others won’t see what you’ve been saving.

When you save a post now, you’ll either get the option to create a new collection or add it to an existing collection. For organizing the posts you already have, you can head to your saved posts and tap on the plus icon in the upper right. The feature should be rolling out to both iOS and Android apps now.

Source: Digital Trends

Instagram merges permanent and disappearing personal messages

There used to be two different places for ephemeral and permanent messages on Instagram’s Direct feature. But that’s changing with this new update. The disappearing messages will now show up in the permanent chat thread. The ephemeral messages will still disappear after the photo and video have been viewed but a note will be left behind mentioning something was shared there before. The change is made to make it easier for you to keep track of your conversations on the service.

Source: The Verge

You can now save Instagram live videos

When being able to save live streams was first omitted from the service, Instagram’s product head Kevin Weil says this was to take away pressure from users to live stream since it won’t be kept permanently. Now, it seems Instagram is backtracking and is following in the footsteps of Facebook’s own Live feature and Twitter’s Periscope. Users can now save their live videos. You just need to tap on Save in the upper right corner of the window to save the video. It won’t save anything interaction you’ve had while you were live, though. When your done saving it’ll be saved in your gallery or camera roll but won’t be in the app anymore. The update is coming to version 10.12 of the app on iOS and Android.

Source: The Verge