Instagram's home screen overhaul is likely intended to take on the photo-sharing app's biggest competitors: TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter and even YouTube. Instagram hopes to drive sales and viral video content instead of its traditional focus on images.
How to Reset Your Instagram Explore Page
While this may seem like a simple design change to some, the addition of these tabs has brought the Likes and Create tabs to the top of the homepage, right next to the message button. The Shop feature isn’t new to the platform, though, only the positioning is. But the push for the new Reels feature is surprising considering Reels has only been live for three months.
“This will definitely lead to longer session times,” Frank Goodman, founder and CEO of small tech company Bleeding Bulb, told Lifewire in an email. “I think app users will appreciate not having to force these features into existing views. That would have definitely made the app too cluttered.”
The Shop tab is in a similar position to the Likes tab, so users may stumble upon the new feature by accident. The Shop page is filled with products from users you may follow or be interested in, depending on what you view the most on the platform. Either way, if users have never made purchases on Instagram or aren’t interested in doing so, this tab may be useless.