The impact if this might not be that huge, but Instagram has announced this week that it will be shutting down the standalone Direct messaging app it has. This was launched for the first time in the year 2017 in the month of December. People are actually not much aware that Instagram had a standalone app. In the year 2017, there were reports that Instagram had been developing a different direct messaging application that will be emerging as a rival to Snapchat.
By this time Instagram had also started with the stories at this point, but Snapchat had no changes in the user base mainly because of the popularity and the messaging function it had. Instagram was able to see Direct as an opportunity to compete with Snap at places it where it might hurt. Initially, Direct had been launched in countries like Italy, Uraguay, Portugal, Turkey, and Israel. These were mainly the places where Snapchat had not been that popular. With the use of a similar strategy, as it happened with the Stories, Instagram was also after offering tolls that were alike Snapchat in the market that Snapchat had not paid much attention to. This would have helped them eventually for negating any of the future efforts by Snap in those areas, as the users would have already had the same tools access with the social graphs established in Facebook itself.
Direct also moved more regions but promotion was not much. As per TechCrunch, the app had about 1.35 million installs across the globe and the largest percent was from Italy and Turkey.
These numbers were not enough for being able to develop and sustain the resources that were needed for maintaining. Therefore it is being removed. As the number of users and awareness were less, the impact of closing it will not be immense.
