Direct (Instagram standalone app)

~ the eulogy ~

For once the experiment was run on us. Turkey usually finds out about an app after the American write-ups have already been translated and reposted, but in December 2017 Instagram picked six countries to try a standalone messaging app in and Turkey was one of them. Uruguay, Chile, Italy, Portugal and Israel were the others. I did not install it. Neither did most people, which turns out to be the finding.

The name causes trouble, so it is worth separating. Instagram Direct, the private messaging feature living inside the main app, arrived in December 2013 and is still there. Direct, the separate app with its own icon on your home screen, is the dead one. It opened straight into the camera rather than the feed, which was the entire pitch: you were meant to send a photo to one person without passing through anything public on the way.

That was a Snapchat-shaped app and everyone said so at the time. Facebook had already tried this at least twice and buried both attempts. What made this attempt different was that Instagram did not launch it and see what happened. It ran the app in six markets and treated the resulting number as an answer.

~ the dossier ~

~ the six countries ~

Nobody at Instagram published a reason for that country list. What is on the record is what came out of it. Sensor Tower counted 1.35 million installs across both app stores over the app's whole life. Turkey supplied 567,000 of those, about 42 percent, and Italy came second at roughly half a million. The other four countries together account for the remainder, which is not very much.

Put that beside the parent product and it stops sounding like a Turkish success. Instagram was past a billion users in 2018. An app that its best country downloaded 567,000 times is not a foothold. It is a control group answering a question, and the question was whether people who already have Instagram will keep a second Instagram icon for the part of it they use most. In the largest test market available, they did not.

~ the rollback ~

The app went quiet before it went away. The iOS build stopped being updated after late December 2018 and the Android one limped through April 2019. On 16 May 2019 Instagram confirmed it, and the wording was careful enough to be worth quoting: they were rolling back the test of the standalone Direct app, and staying focused on making Instagram Direct the best place for conversations with your friends. Not a shutdown. A test concluding.

Users were told to do nothing at all, because the conversations were already in the same place they had always been. That is the part that separates this from an ordinary app death. Nothing was lost and no archive needed rescuing. Direct was a second door onto a room that was never going anywhere, and when the door came off the room was unaffected. Somewhere in an old backup there is a Turkish phone with the icon still on the third home screen, opening onto nothing.

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