What Is Instagram Instants? Meta’s New App Lets You Send Photos That Disappear After Viewing

Meta has launched a new standalone app called Instants, built around Instagram. It's designed for quick, unedited photo sharing with friends, and photos disappear after 24 hours. If that sounds familiar, it should.

What Instants Actually Does

The idea is simple. You open the app, it goes straight to the camera, you shoot, and you share. No filters, no editing, no uploading from your gallery. Just the moment, sent out instantly.

Photos can only be viewed once and disappear after 24 hours. You can add text, but that's the extent of the editing tools. The app's own tagline is "real life, real quick."

You don't need a new account. It uses your existing Instagram login, and anything shared through Instants can also be seen in the main Instagram app.

Not Exactly a New Idea

Instants isn't coming out of nowhere. It's essentially a renamed and repackaged version of Shots, a feature Meta had already been testing inside Instagram in select regions. That in-app version didn't get much traction, so Meta has now pulled it out into its own dedicated app.

The feature has also been in the works for a while. References to Instants were spotted in Instagram's back-end code back in February, and Meta confirmed it was experimenting with the concept at the time.

Availability

Instants is live on Android broadly and rolling out to iOS in select regions. The full iOS rollout appears to be region-dependent for now, with Spain and Italy among the confirmed markets.

The app is not available in India at the time of writing.