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Last year, Instagram’s mobile site did nothing more than allow for basic interactions. You could peruse your feed, like photos, and leave comments, but there wasn’t a way to post pictures. Today, you can not only post pictures to Instagram from your browser, but create new Stories and save posts. Is the future of Instagram’s mobile site getting brighter?

Creating Stories

Instagram recently added the option to create new stories using your browser. Log in and tap the camera icon in the top left of your feed to start a new story. You can add one block of text, change its size or color, and save the final results to your phone.

Unfortunately, you can’t add videos, stickers, polls, or doodles, which makes the app a keeper for now. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if these features eventually found their way to the mobile site.

Saving Posts

The save icon also makes an appearance on the mobile site near the bottom right corner of posts. Tapping it saves posts to the Saved tab in your profile. You can’t organize saved posts into Collections from the mobile site, but don’t be surprised if this feature pops up later.

Advantages of Using Instagram Mobile

The app maintains a feature advantage, but the mobile site is not without its own advantages.

For now, Instagram’s mobile site doesn’t show any ads or sponsored posts in your feed. The app is so littered with them that I hardly recognize my feed sometimes. It almost feels pointless to curate who I follow, when so much of my feed was selected by Instagram rather than myself.

The experience reminds me of using official Twitter apps, but you can at least use an ad-free Twitter app to get around the ads. Instagram’s mobile site is the closest you’ll get to that experience – for now. I don’t expect this to last long.

Without all the bells and whistles (and ads), the mobile site also looks cleaner and less busy. It feels easier to focus on what you love most about Instagram: seeing and sharing images. These advantages may not outweigh Instagram’s feature rich apps, but they do hint at a brighter future for Instagram’s mobile site.

If you’re tired of seeing ads in your feed or spend more time lurking than posting on Instagram, give the mobile site a try. Comment below with your thoughts on Instagram’s mobile site and features you hope to see added next!