It’s fitting, then, that just as Twitter is getting a rethink, a new app is emerging to challenge Instagram. The app’s founders won’t say that’s what they’re doing, but they left Meta last spring to incubate a bunch of products that would actually bring family and friends back into your social photo feed, instead of brand marketers and celebrity reels. The result is Retro.
Retro is a new, photo-focused mobile app rolling out to Apple’s App Store today. Like other newer photo-sharing apps—BeReal comes to mind—Retro uses specific constraints to differentiate itself. It’s private by default; people must request to follow (and ultimately co-follow) each other. Users are prompted to first share select photos from their phone’s camera roll in order to view others’ photos.
Your photo albums are then grouped week by week, going back as many weeks as your native camera roll exists. Any photos from earlier than four weeks ago are locked, and your friends need a private key to view them. There are no photo filters in Retro, at least not yet, and video clips are capped at 60 seconds. If Instagram is now a publicly performative photo app, and your private messages are a messy mix of text, tapbacks, and the occasional photo, Retro is trying to thread the space between the two.
Lauren Goode
Another month, another photo sharing app thinking it can take on Instagram. While not as constraining as BeReal, nothing in this description strikes me as instantly compelling. It’s iOS only at launch, a major flaw for an app launching in 2023. That aside, I also don’t like that you must first share some of your photos in order to participate, it reminds me of Snapchat’s Streak.
Being private by default it won’t enjoy the type of rapid growth of public social networks; it has no discernable business model; and if it switches to a paid app or subscription model, it would further reduce its growth and potential user base. I just don’t see a pressing need for yet another photo sharing app when people can just as easily send photos on (free) messaging apps, without this artificial friction. Case in point: BeReal has already lost momentum as daily users have dropped 61% from its October peak of 15 million to less than 6 million in March.
The misperception about disruption is that it’s a function of innovation or excellence. In fact, disruption is driven by stasis and the incompetence of incumbents. Threads is void of any real product innovation — it’s a stripped-down Twitter clone pushed into the market by a team not much larger than the Prof G Media team. (Memo to self: Challenge team to grow newsletter to 110 million subscribers in a week.) And that’s the thing: Threads’ early success has nothing to do with Threads. It’s a function of the dysfunction at Twitter (aka Elon) and Meta’s monopoly footprint.
Scott Galloway
More importantly, as Scott Galloway notes in the article above, there’s little dysfunction at Instagram that challengers can take advantage of. Despite various discontent with some of their stances, the vast majority of users seem content to stay on Instagram – as opposed to Twitter, where the growing selection of alternatives is attracting users who feel they can no longer support the platform…
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