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Innovation Stagnation

Innovation Stagnation

January 23, 2025

Social Platforms Continue to Copy Each Other’s Features

You've probably had this thought before—it's something I think about a lot. The most popular social apps seem to have stopped innovating on product features, and instead, they’re all just playing copycat with whatever the latest trend is. When CapCut started gaining traction in the creator ecosystem, it was only a matter of time before everyone else copied them.

I think this is the downfall of consumer mobile apps right now— you have to defend against YouTube, TikTok and Instagram copying your platform’s features. It’s become a game of whether your app is defensible or not against the big players.

Fear leads to copying, copying leads to stagnation, stagnation leads to way too many apps that are all doing similar things.

During COVID, Clubhouse topped the app charts, which led to a slew of copycats across platforms like X (Twitter Spaces), Meta (Live Audio Rooms), and Spotify (Greenroom). If you’ve been following me for a while, you know how much I talk about this topic. But after scrolling through the top apps recently, I think we’re seeing another wave of features becoming platforms, and platforms stacking on more features.

Are Consumer Apps Defensible Against the Big Platforms?

The most obvious example is short-form video feeds. Right now, it feels like every single app revolves around a short-form video feed—or has implemented one in the past 3-4 months. X is now the latest app to introduce a dedicated tab for short-form content, which comes about a year and a half after allowing users to post videos up to 2 hours long—it really is becoming the everything app. Bluesky also coincidentally rolled out a short-form section shortly after the TikTok ban.

This is the new X video tab.

Consumer Apps are Currently Dominating The App Store Charts…

There have also been a few interesting developments following the brief period when TikTok was banned (aside from Xiaohongshu still being #1). Short-form video apps are climbing the Apple Store charts, and I’ve come across so many I’d never even heard of before:

ReelShort: Short movies, dramas, and vertical TV mini-series.

Likee: A short-form feed with live streams and filters.

DramaBox: Indie and drama shorts, all in vertical format, with a focus on international and Asian dramas.

Flip: Commerce-driven vertical content, spotlighting product reviews and shopping.

Clapper: A TikTok clone, but ad-free, with an emphasis on uplifting and inspiring content.

6 apps in the top 25 were vertical video apps

I noticed a few CapCut clones, like InShot and Filmora, rise in the App Store (CapCut was also unusable during the ban). Instagram is even working on their own version of mobile editing called “Edits.”

I’m very skeptical that many of these alternatives will remain popular now that TikTok is back (although it is not currently on the App Store). However, It’s obvious that people went to the second, third, and fourth options when everything from ByteDace left the store.

Where is the Innovation?

I’ll give it to Instagram—it’s one of the few platforms I use regularly that actually introduces new features I haven’t seen anywhere else (aside from stories). I feel like just in the last week they rolled out a feature where you can see an entire feed of Reels your friends have liked. At first I thought it was weird that people could see what I liked, but then I realized that an entire feed dedicated to pre-vetted Reels wasn’t a bad trade-off. Instagram has actually had a few innovations in the past few years like Instagram Notes, comments on stories, and 20 panel carousels (up from 10).

So be careful what Reels you like because your friends may be watching…

Let’s see what my friends like…

The Big Takeaway…

Most of the big platforms have decided they no longer want to innovate—they’d rather sit back, wait to see what becomes popular, and then add it as a feature. If I were in their position, I’d do the same. Why take the development risk of launching something untested when you can just watch which apps gain traction and implement their ideas later? Also, if you’re an app with a popular feature everyone loves, at some point, you’ll have to defend yourself against big platforms coming in and stealing it.