Your Instagram home screen is getting a redesign.
Instagram is rolling out a new-look home screen starting today that puts Reels and Shop tabs in the app's bottom navigation bar. This change moves your Activity and Create buttons to the upper right corner of the home screen, right next to your Direct button.
Reels is Instagram's TikTok competitor that launched earlier this year. With it, you can create 30-second videos that you can edit, set music to, and add AR effects. Tapping on the Reels tab will let you quickly start viewing other videos people have made, and the fact that Reels has gotten its own spot in the app's navigation bar shows Instagram's dedication to the feature.
Meanwhile, tapping on the Shop tab will get you personalized recommendations, editors' picks that've been curated by the @shop channel, shoppable videos, and new product collections.
"We don’t take these changes lightly – we haven’t updated Instagram’s home screen in a big way for quite a while," explained Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram. "But how people create and enjoy culture has changed, and the biggest risk to Instagram is not that we change too fast, but that we don’t change and become irrelevant. We’re excited about the new design and believe it gives the app a much-needed refresh, while staying true to our core value of simplicity. We’ll continue listening to your feedback so we can keep improving Instagram for you."
Instagram is one of the most popular apps in the world, and so a home screen update like this is a big deal. Adding tabs for Reels and Shop to the bottom navigation bar make them more discoverable, and Instagram is hoping that giving them this prominence will help new people find them for the first time and help those already familiar with the features jump back into them more quickly.
