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Instagram is bringing over one of its 3D Touch features from iOS to Android — and it doesn’t matter if you have a pressure-sensitive screen on your device.
Now whenever Instagram presents a grid view of photos, like when you visit someone’s profile or search a tag in the Explore section, the newest update conveniently lets users press and hold a thumbnail to enlarge the photo, while making the rest of the screen blurred out. Basically it eliminates the need to tap on a photo, and then hit the back button to go back to the grid.
When users bring up a photo by pressing and holding it, three buttons also pop up on the bottom: the like, comment, and share icons. You can drag your finger to the heart to like the photo, the text bubble to comment on it, or on the share icon to share the photo to a fellow user through Instagram Direct. It’s fast and pretty straightforward. Moving your finger to each of the the icons provides a soft haptic feedback, and taking your finger off the device brings it back to the grid screen.
It’s nice to see Instagram realizing that the feature doesn’t exactly need a pressure-sensitive screen to be utilized, and porting over the feature shows that it must be popular on iOS. The update isn’t anything revolutionary, but it’s a neat UI improvement for the Android version.
Over on the iOS side of things, the company is still testing 3D Touch ads, allowing you to purchase various items with Apple Pay and bringing a new focus to “frictionless shopping.”
The new Android feature hasn’t quite hit the Google Play store yet, but it’s rolling out in the 7.13.0 update.
