UPDATE: Apple has removed The OG app from the App Store, developers confirmed on Twitter.
In a thread, the app creators said they made several changes to the app at Apple‘s request before it was approved for inclusion in the App Store. “There are dozens of other apps in the top charts that replicate Instagram’s user experience that have been there for years,” they said.
Prior to its removal, the OG app had been downloaded 10,000 times. “We are working on re-listing OG on the App Store,” developers say. It’s still live on the Google Play store.
Original Story:
Meta’s ongoing quest to turn Instagram into TikTok 2.0 has buried users under a barrage of suggested posts and ads.
Despite audience pushback, the company doesn’t appear to be backing down from its video-first strategy. So developers have taken matters into their own hands with The OG App(Opens in a new window)—a nostalgic piece of software that harkens back to the good ol’ days of filtered-photo sharing.
Available on iOS and Android(Opens in a new window), the back-to-basics app is a near-clone of Instagram, complete with the familiar layout, direct messages, and notifications. The main difference is your ability to disable ads, suggested content, and other “distractions” like Reels and the Discover page.
Users an also build curated personal feeds and pause refresh for 24 hours, according to Digital Trends(Opens in a new window), which notes that the OG App has a few issues to resolve, most notably the login process—some people signed up with no problem, while others were met with error messages.
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The platform may also seem a sluggish, as it’s pulling information second-hand from IG and filtering it through OG. As TechCrunch notes(Opens in a new window), this means that The OG App developers are relying on Meta’s APIs, which the company could technically revoke at any time (a la Twitter), but OG devs tell TechCrunch they’re not worried about that right now.
The OG website is hinting at an app that houses “all your social feeds,” including TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit. Aside from a “Coming Soon” banner, though, details are scant.
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