Instagram's new Snapchat-cloning Stories feature already has more than 100 million daily active users and in version 9.3 of their app - released earlier today - the Facebook-owned platform has provided some new Stories additions to improve the functionality of the option.
First, Stories users will now be able to save the photos and videos that they post to their Instagram Stories to their camera roll. To do this, you need to tap the gear icon in the Stories interface, then activate "Save Shared Photos" button.
This will then save all your Stories content to your phone's storage - it's currently all or nothing, you can't pick and choose which specific posts you save, but you can, of course, go in and delete any posts you don't want to keep.
Snapchat introduced a similar option recently in Memories and the added functionality in Instagram will enable users to more easily re-purpose Stories content on other platforms.
In addition to the new save functionality, Instagram has also released a new mute option to get rid of people's Stories you're not interested in.
One of the main criticisms in the early going for Stories has been that your Stories feed can get very crowded, as many users have built large followings on Instagram over time. Also, as Stories is a very different offering, some people who you might want to follow on Instagram might actually not be as great at creating Stories content.
When you select 'Mute' on an account's Instagram story, that users' Story bubble will be moved to the end of your Stories queue, and it'll no longer auto-advance to that Story unless you un-mute.
And the last addition to Stories is the ability to choose a color when adding text to Stories.
In what seems like something of an oversight, Instagram didn't actually provide an option for different text colors in the original version of Stories - all text had to be white. Users added some makeshift flair to this by painting sections then writing over those colors - but now, you'll be able to select different text colors as soon as you press the text option. You can also tap and hold a color to get more specific variations on a spectrum.
As noted, Stories has already proven popular - for comparison, Snapchat says that around 50 million of their daily active user base create their own stories. And while Instagram Stories still doesn't have all the features of Snapchat - most notably, Lenses and Geofilters - you can bet that Instagram will introduce similar sometime soon.
It was a bold move by Instagram to copy one of Snapchat's core features so openly, but the numbers show that it's already paying off. With new additions like these, and added functionality over time, Instagram Stories could deliver a significant blow to Snapchat's growth.
Or at least, that is, unless Snapchat comes out with something even better.