As far as we’re concerned, shaking your phone like a bartender making a martini for Daniel Craig isn’t exactly the most reasonable response to running into a bug, but it’s still completely valid. So long as you have a firm grip.
Instagram, it appears, concurs, and is therefore baking the gesture of vexation into its UI. How? By letting you use it to report errors.
Shake it off, Instagram
Yes, you read that right. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the new feature on Wednesday, specifically calling it a “Rage Shake”. It works as you might expect it to: should you encounter an error, or should the app not work as intended while you’re using it, shake your phone about and you’ll be presented with a “Did something go wrong?” prompt.
Covering ✌️ this week:
– Carousel Deletion (finally!)
– Rage ShakeDid you know about these 💎s? Any other features you’d like me to cover? Let me know 👇 pic.twitter.com/Yx0q4UGFfb
— Adam Mosseri 😷 (@mosseri) November 17, 2021
There, you can explain in detail exactly what happened and throw in an accompanying screenshot for good measure, after which someone will go over your problem and make sure it’s resolved in future. Mosseri also says you can take the opportunity to express “all of the emotions and feels you’ve got going on” due to the error, though we’re going to assume this was more tongue-in-cheek than serious.
While it’s neither groundbreaking nor entirely necessary, we think it’s fun. You can also toggle it on and off in your settings so you don’t accidentally send an error report while scrolling on a bumpy road trip.
Mosseri announced a second addition to Instagram that he called a “finally” feature, meaning it should really have been rolled out ages ago, and has “finally” arrived. This is the ability to delete a single image in a carousel post. If you don’t know, carousels are those posts with multiple images you can swipe through.
Previously, if you wanted to edit a carousel because you accidentally put an out of place picture in the middle of it, you’d have to delete the whole thing and start from scratch. Now you can simply hit the menu icon at the top right corner of a post, select ‘Edit’, swipe over to the photo you’re not so keen on anymore and then hit the delete icon. Simple as that.
The carousel deletion feature is only available to iOS users for now, but users on any mobile platform can start rage shaking away.