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Meta Cracks Down on Ad-Free Instagram Client a Day After It Launched (engadget.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
A third-party Instagram app, called "The OG App," which promised an ad-free feed more like the original Instagram experience, has been pulled from Apple's App Store just one day after it officially launched. It's not clear if Apple pulled the app at the request of Meta, but the social network confirmed it had taken "enforcement actions" against the service. From a report: "This app violates our policies and we're taking all appropriate enforcement actions," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson declined to elaborate on what those actions were, or if it had been in contact with Apple, but pointed to a blog post outlining Meta's policies barring clone sites. "A clone site is a third-party site that duplicates, in whole or in part, the content of an existing site," Meta explains. On Twitter, the developers of The OG App said their entire team had been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram as a result of their ties to the service.
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Meta Cracks Down on Ad-Free Instagram Client a Day After It Launched More

Meta Cracks Down on Ad-Free Instagram Client a Day After It Launched

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  • Meta is going away (Score:5, Insightful)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @10:08AM (#62923729)

    I think this is a clear sign that Meta is failing. Meta is not building products that people want, they are building advertising that only advertisers want. Meta has put itself on a slow liquidation and it is only a matter of time before it fades into history.

    • Re:Meta is going away (Score:5, Funny)

      by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @10:25AM (#62923777)
      I'm waiting for Meta to get bought out by MySpace.
    • And the sooner that happens, the better off we'll all be

    • Re:Meta is going away (Score:5, Informative)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @10:47AM (#62923841) Journal

      If this isn't the oldest story of the commercial internet access era its the second oldest.

      Chapter 1)Company creates ad supported service
      Chapter 2 )Company needs/wants more revenue..number of ads increase
      Chapter 3)users gets irritated
      Here is the choose your own adventure part:
      Does the service primarily appeal to not-to-tech-savy users? Goto Chapter 10
      Chapter 4) The griping gets louder
      Does a hero step forward with some alternative FOSS client or adblocking solution? if not goto Chapter 9.
      Chapter 5) The adblocking and alternative client becomes popular
      Chapter 6) The law suits commence
      Is the lawsuit successful? Goto Chapter 9
      Chapter 7) 15 alternative clients loaded with malware and other crap worse than the original ads emerge; the public is confused
      Chapter 8) The Media starts running stories on the danagers of $service, not explaining most of the problems come from using the unoffical clients.
      Chapter 9) A period of steadily declining revenue and market share begins
      Chapter 10) Service shuts down.

      • Re:Meta is going away (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @11:39AM (#62923971)
        I appreciate the effort, but you missed the "Chapter 7) Company goes bankrupt" opportunity. Or "Chapter 11) Company reorganized by bankruptcy"

        • Because it largely doesn't happen anymore, especially not to a company of this size. Any major company that gets close to this point will be bought out by a competitor due to the large amount of IP big tech accumulates in the modern times.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            That is why I specifically did not mention bankruptcy. Meta isnt going anywhere. I can on the other hand imagine them 'phasing out Instagram' trying to move users to their other platforms - facebook. Hence "service shuts down"

    • You're underestimating their financial reserves.
      Sure, Facebook is in decline, their metaverse crap is never going to take off.
      But Instagram and Whatsapp are still very popular.
      It's going to take 10 years for either of those to get replaced, 5 at best.
      And after that Meta can still keep going for years, just running products used by a small user group, slowly spending all their money until they can sell what remains.

  • On Twitter, the developers of The OG App said their entire team had been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram as a result of their ties to the service.

    I don't see this as a bad thing. I got rid of Facebook in early 2017 and haven't missed it a bit.

  • Against the TOS for developers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @10:09AM (#62923737)
    Umm... Instagram jealously guarded their brand and clamped down heavily on what you could do with their API. They even asked devs to write in plain English what their use case was. Scraping data from their site and repackaging it as a different product was clearly spelled out as breach of terms. How did The OG App even get that far?

  • This why need to break the Appstore monopoly (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @10:17AM (#62923757)
    We can use this as evidence for the need for third party app stores and anti walled garden legislation.

    • > We can use this as evidence for the need for third party app stores and anti walled garden legislation.

      Yeah, even with an emergency injunction it's unlikely that this would have moved so fast without Big Tech collusion.

  • Have you noticed? (Score:3)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @10:18AM (#62923761)

    There are no terms of service or copyrights or patents in the Star Trek universe? There's no advertising either.

    • Re:Have you noticed? (Score:4, Funny)

      by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @10:26AM (#62923783)
      It's the most un-American SciFi I've ever seen. It should be banned!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        It's science fantasy.

        The Prime Directive - in all it's fucked up scenarios of misstep - is a metaphor for US hegemony, and they have always pushed the latest socially-left ideological craze, so I'm not sure how you could say it's anti-American.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      Quark begs to differ.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      They also have magical sources of energy/power, don't drink alcohol, and use other fantasy devices to drive social plots.

      Let's not forget that the First Directive is, fundamentally, a metaphor for the US "nonintervention" policy... which, just like the show, doesn't really exist because of political expansionism.

      It's an interesting metaphor and fun science fantasy, but it's got very little bearing on reality. Let's not pretend it's something which it isn't.

    • There are no terms of service or copyrights or patents in the Star Trek universe? There's no advertising either.

      I can't seem to remember advertisement in many fantasy stories which have no basis in reality. But that's just what they are, a fantasy.

  • Or had they really just duplicated the experience?

    I can't tell for sure, but if it's really just the latter, there's a major injustice happening here.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cb88 ( 1410145 )
      It was an Instagram client...period. Which is a violation of their TOS.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        You aren't actually answering the question, you know.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by cb88 ( 1410145 )
          I absolutely did answer the question.... if they were just duplicating the UI....that would not be an Instagram client.

          It was a client to browse Instagram... how can you be so dense as to not get it.

          Nobody was creating clone of Instagram you'd have to sign up for separately that would NOT be an Instagram client but a separate social network.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mark-t ( 151149 )
            By that token, then, any web browser that they don't authorize is also violating their TOS.

  • Yes, I'm old. Old enough to remember the Meta when he was just a stalking program. He started small, and he'll end small.

  • All about the ads (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ppb1701 ( 1226322 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @10:31AM (#62923797)

    The only reason meta cares is because this app bypasses users seeing ads. They'd go after Ad Block, Adguard and others too if they had better case against them. The only reason Meta puts more effort into their ads is so people wont just use the browsers that might have an ad blocker installed.

    Meta's product is the users eyeballs....not the feed itself.

    • Correction * effort into apps

      (silly autocorrect)

    • This is exactly why Instagram is a free service. Like stated before, if one isn't paying for it, they are the product. If one wants to do it "right", they should go with paid sites, be it Smugmug, or hosting gallery software via WordPress.

  • "This app violates our policies..."

    Obviously: it's not profitable.

  • Another reason (Score:2, Funny)

    by KlomDark ( 6370 )

    knowing that I dodged a bullet learning to hate Apple at an early age. Shitty shitty company.

  • I've posted this a few times, but on Android you can view your timeline without ads in the current app. Open it, and scroll down a smidge, and watch the top left. You should see a pull-down menu appear, select 'Following', and you just see who you're following, and no ads. Spotted this a year or two ago, haven't looked back.

    I checked a friends IOS app and didn't appear this was there, so I believe it's only on Android.

  • of closed systems

  • Eliminate all user content altogether and just run constant ads? Every other post is an ad on all their platforms. YouTube isn't far behind either.

  • And what does the app dev expect in return? (Score:3)

    by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Thursday September 29, 2022 @12:35PM (#62924147)
    So the developers created a new company, Un1feed, with 8 employees and pulled in $1M in pre-seed funding to release a free Instagram client app. I get shitting on Apple and Meta here, but has no one stopped to ask what Un1feed expected to get out of it? What is their monetization plan (and, despite them saying otherwise, you know they have one if they are getting outside funding).
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )

        Every once in awhile people will pay money to try and solve a problem rather than perpetuate it for commercial gain. Not every investment is for monetary return. Some aim their sights higher on situational return l. Not many, but some.

        Riiiiiight! So they going to pay those 8 employees on good vibes then? Man what the fuck are you smoking?

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )
            You do that with your own money. Venture Capitalists are not in it to intentionally burn their money to stick it to social media companies for no return (they do plenty of that by accident anyway). Also looking into it a bit more I found this:

            Un1Feed makes use of newly popularized blockchain technology to securely store and handle user data. The platform lets users transfer their digital social identity seamlessly across different apps. VC investments in consumer crypto startups have been on the uptick, and Un1Feed is the latest company to realize a new application of this hot technology.

            “Unfortunately, the blockchain/crypto space is still too technical for most of the world. We want to allow the majority of users to easily gain the many benefits of web3, like the ease through which they can monetize almost everything they do for free in Web 2.0, without any technical experience”, said founder and co-CEO Ansh Nanda.

            So it's a crypto play (AKA a scam).

  • A year or two ago, I built a mobile client for Flickr that looked like Instagram. I couldn't even get it in the App Store, for it being considered too similar to Instagram by the gatekeepers.
  • Recently it has crashed pretty much as soon as I open the app. Can't give a rating to an app that isn't even usable. Open? Instantly crashes. Very annoying and used to work perfectly. Quit changing things that do not need changed. All it does is cause more issues and bugs. As you can see, very severe ones at that. If possible I would leave 0-star rating given you can't even open the app. Instagram video downloader official https://downloader2x.com/en/ [downloader2x.com] get video Instagram

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