You might be wondering why it took so long for the Facebook-owned social network to integrate these languages. Well, the team had to reconfigure the entire app in order to accommodate languages which are read from right-to-left, by default major operating systems support languages such as English and French that are written from left to right hence their faster integration. The feature is currently available in Android (which is the preferred OS by over 70% of Arabic users) with iOS support coming soon. Languages aside, the company is testing a new feature involving stop-motion videos. This are clips made from stitching together still images and animating them to make the illusion of motion. TechCrunch explains “Like a traditional stop motion, the effect on Instagram combines multiple still photos into a video to either give stationary objects the appearance of being in motion or make time appear to speed up.” This feature comes soon after Instagram added Super Zoom effect to mark Halloween, it does dramatic zoom-ins to a short Stories clip. The stop-motion feature is expected to be applicable to Stories posts as well. It is important to note that not all tested features make it into the public version of the app, some of them take a long period in the testing phase such as the WhatsApp’s delete sent messages feature, but finally make it to the users.
