Instagram is quietly launching a dedicated app made for messaging. Called Bolt, it's initially available for iOS and Android on the moment of launching.
With the photo-sharing app becoming more popular, Instagram is getting a fierce competition from others in the business. One which is Snapchat. With Bolt, users can quickly send a photo or a video to a friend, which then disappears once it's been read.
Made to be similar to Taptalk, Bolt is prettier and easy to use. Users just need to tap on a friend's face to send a photo instantly (a friend's face is essentially a trigger for the shutter). Long-pressing will send them a video, and shaking the phone will undo any accidentally made message.
When a user receives a Bolt, it appears at the top of the camera screen where he/she can reply in one of two ways: text on top of the image or with a new image. If the user wants to delete the said image, he'she can just swipe it away which will destroy it instantly.
Bolt being similar to Taptalk, only allows users to send messages to one person at a time, which makes it most useful for sending quick photos or videos to a small number of people. The favorites bar at the bottom of the app only holds four friends. Users can add friends to up to 20, and accessing them is easy by swiping.
Initially available only to users in New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa, Bolt is aiming to scale up with by attracting more users in other regions as the progress goes. Instagram said that it picked those three countries first because they each feature high Instagram usage, deeply interconnected communities, high penetration of Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and speak English.
"We're going to other regions soon, but are starting with a handful of countries to make sure we can scale the experience," said the company's spokesperson. "Instagram has 65 percent of its users overseas, so an international launch, while different, is actually not all that out of order with what we do."
A Separate App For Different Mission
What makes Bolt more interesting is that it's Instagram's first ever dedicated app outside its main app. Bolt isn't connected to Instagram so users don't need to signup of login to the social media. It also doesn't have the facility to import friends from there or have a username for easy adding.
This can be frustrating to some. But as Instagram is keeping its tradition to keep things simple, creating a dedicated app to do different thing can be a great way to represent different brands under one flag.
At first, Bolt is designed to be incredibly simple and easy to use, unlike its competitor Snapchat which holds a lot of feature. To some users, this is very useful, but to some, this can be overwhelming.
Bolt's release comes close after Facebook launched Slingshot. The messaging app allows users to do many similar things to Bolt. With similar text editors and a big white text on top of photos and videos, Slingshot and Bolt do the same thing to those with the same needs, but with different actual usage.
