Watch out, Snapchat. Instagram on Thursday announced that more than 200 million people now use its Stories feature every day.
That's pretty impressive, considering Instagram launched the Snapchat ripoff just eight months ago, but you might be wondering why the Facebook-owned social network would call out the seemingly random number. Here's why: rival Snapchat in its February IPO filing revealed that "on average, 158 million people use Snapchat daily."
So basically, Instagram is low key bragging that its Stories feature is now more popular than Snapchat. To be fair, Snapchat's numbers were from two months ago, so it's highly possible that the app's daily active user count went up since then. Either way, it's safe to say that Instagram Stories is giving Snapchat some serious competition.
Meanwhile, Instagram also today introduced some new tools, including the ability to turn a selfie into a sticker.
"When you take a photo or video and tap the smiley face, you'll see a new sticker with a camera icon that lets you capture a mini-selfie," Instagram explained in its blog post. You can then pin your selfie sticker to a specific spot in a video. To do that, just tap and hold the sticker, place it where you like, and confirm by tapping "Pin."
Instagram also introduced "geostickers" for those in Chicago, London, Madrid, and Tokyo. These are basically the same thing as Snapchat's geofilters: cute graphic stickers that are only available in certain locations.
It should also now be easier to access your favorite Instagram stickers. Just tap the smiley face and swipe right to see all the stickers you've recently used. Finally, when you're recording a video using "Hands-Free" mode, you'll now see a timer that counts down to when the video begins.