What you need to know
- Instagram has increased the minimum amount of time its Daily Limit notifications can be configured for.
- 30 minutes is now the shortest period of time Daily Limits can be set up for — up from just 10.
- Parent group Meta recently reported slowing growth with the suggestion being this move was to help arrest that.
Instagram has quietly tweaked its Daily Limit feature, seemingly to ensure people spend more time on the social network.
The Daily Limit feature allows people to control how much time they spend on Instagram — after a specified amount of time the app warns you that you've been scrolling for too long. Previously the lowest time limit was 10 minutes, but as a new TechCrunch report points out, that's now 30 minutes.
In a move that appears to coincide with Facebook/Meta reporting slowing growth, photo-sharing app Instagram appears to have quietly removed the ability for mobile users to set a lower daily time limit reminder than 30 minutes.
And that, right there, seems to be the rub. Slowing growth is never a good thing for any platform — social or otherwise. Having people limited to spending just ten minutes on Instagram could severely limit how addicted they become, reducing the possibility that they'll in turn infect someone else with the same need to scroll through endless photos of lunch menus and whatnot.
Whether the change was decided upon by Instagram itself or from the big bosses at Meta isn't clear, but it would be mighty interesting to hear the justification for such a move.
All of this aside, Instagram remains the best iPhone app for sharing photos and while TikTok is the place to be for video, there remains room for both to coexist. No matter how much Instagram tries to eat TikTok's lunch by 'borrowing' features.
