Not cloned: Instagram now lets you send photo and video replies to Stories

Instagram is boosting Stories with an interesting new feature: ability to send photo or video replies to Stories from the people you are following.  The app now gives you access to the full camera features that are built into the regular Instagram camera — which means you can add things like face filters, regular filters, and even send a Boomerang as a reply to Stories. These replies will include a sticker of the original story which is resizable just like a regular sticker.

Instagram has been criticized for cloning almost all of the features from Snapchat in the past, but the company’s latest feature isn’t a copycat. Now that Instagram has caught up to Snapchat in terms of features (and has a lot more users than Snapchat), the social network seems to be focused on bringing its own ideas to the platform. Snapchat actually added a set of major new features to its platform just yesterday — including things like links to snaps (which are available to Instagram Stories users with more than 10 thousand followers), background drops for snaps, and more. It’ll likely only be a matter of time until Instagram opens up links for stories to everyone.

As per usual, the latest feature for Instagram is launching on Android and iOS initially. It isn’t clear whether this feature will make it to the company’s Windows 10 app as of yet.