One app to rule them all! Why social media companies will never stay in their lane.

It's June 2021. You log on to Amazon, only to be greeted by a new feature. It's Chapters - an exciting new way to connect with fellow shoppers! After a deep sigh, you click on the first one. "New Purchase! ????", the text reads below a hastily scribbled out picture of a Nutri-bullet. Surprise, it's Amazon Stories! How did we get here?

Who remembers the outrage when Instagram introduced stories? Or the confusion when they added a fully-fledged direct messaging function.

"Why do we need stories on IG? We already have Snapchat!"

"Instagram is trying to be WhatsApp!"

This kind of clothes-stealing has been a huge part of the social media landscape in the latter half of the past decade, with 2020 giving rise to a surge in copycat features being implemented across the board. The release of Instagram Reels, Twitter Fleets, and Snapchat Spotlight is merely the latest episode in this saga.

For me, the first shot fired in this war was the Instagram update in 2016 that brought Stories to the app. Casey Neistat's 'Instagram MURDERS Snapchat' video does a great job at highlighting the extent to which Instagram Stories resembled Snapchat’s highly popular feature and the shockwaves this caused across the world.

It was an unprecedented move. They broke the rules, none had dared to engage in flagrant plagiarism on this scale before. And the worst part? it paid off.

A side-by-side comparison of data from Statista gives us an insight into the impact this play had on Snapchat's usage numbers. Instagram Stories was released in Q3 of 2016 and soon had 100 million users which, at the time was a quarter of their user-base. By 2019, Instagram Stories had 500 million daily active users compared to a total of 766 million monthly users of the Instagram app as a whole. Thus, it's clear to see that it took a few years for Instagram Stories to catch on and become regularly used by a majority of its users.

For Snapchat, there was an immediate effect of slowed growth. Its user-base grew by 46 million in the first half of 2016, but it only gained 13 million users in the latter half of the year following the launch of IG stories suggesting the two could be linked. While Instagram Stories was storming to half a billion active users in the year leading up to 2019, Snapchat was experiencing a deep plateau and actually lost millions of daily active users as they struggled to carve out a new space for themselves.

In the end, whilst Snapchat managed to weather the storm and survive this story-stealing saga, the move from Instagram opened a pandora's box, setting social media on the plagiarising path that has led to the situation we find ourselves in today.

In fact, trying to write an up-to-date article on this ongoing saga was like a game of whack-a-mole, with a new unoriginal update seemingly being released every few days. In the last month alone we've seen Twitter, Linkedin, and now even Spotify rolling out their own 'stories' features. If you want to gauge a sense of just how deep this runs, take a look at the table below from AXIOS comparing all the major platforms and their features.

At the current rate, it seems like it's only a matter of months before the entire grid is painted green.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: in today's climate, it is simply not in the interest of social media platforms to stay in their lane. Having an app with a niche purpose with a dedicated audience is all fun and games until someone bigger comes along, steals your best feature, and leaves you vulnerable to falling into irrelevancy.

But there's also another angle to this, and it's centered around our collective love-hate relationship with social media. These days we're all trying to be a bit more conscious of our screen-time, and the constant cycle of switching between five different social media apps throughout the day makes this very difficult. When it comes to apps on our phones, our natural instinct is to downsize and cut back, and the social media giants are making it easier for us by packing more functionality into their apps with each one of these copycat updates.

This is why, more and more, we're seeing a situation where all the major apps are converging on one another. They all want a 'stories' function, a swipe-up short-form video feed, and direct messaging - even if this comes at the cost of creating a nightmarishly complicated UI.

I'd imagine no developer wants to sacrifice the vision and original purpose of their social media app, but their desire not to be eaten up by the competition is clearly stronger. Indeed, it has to be if they are to survive.

We're headed towards a strange, cookie-cutter future. It's a race to build an all-in-one social media platform. One app to rule them all.