Are you an avid instagrammer? Then the app’s new feature is for you: you can finally save on mobile data consumption. Here’s the new procedure
Stories are undoubtedly one of Instagram’s most successful features. Every day, timed content made on the Facebook-owned social platform is viewed by hundreds of millions of users, interested in finding out what their favorite influencers are doing, where their friends are, and so on.
Easy and quick to “consume”, Stories have been an almost immediate success, perhaps even more so than initially anticipated. To be fair, however, Stories have a small-big flaw: they consume a huge amount of data. Even if they are short, they are still videos, and watching 10 or 15 of them in a row is a serious risk of exceeding the data threshold of your rate plan. For this reason – and to meet the needs of users in emerging countries – Instagram has just added a feature to reduce data consumption. This way you can continue to see as many Stories as you want without running the risk of running out of data connection.
How to enable data saving on Instagram
Most popular apps today have a mode that allows you to save precious mobile data. Among Mark Zuckerberg’s apps, all of them have a Lite version. But Instagram was the only one cut off. At least until yesterday, when the company integrated the feature in all Android devices.
To use this, you need to update and start Instagram. Then you need to follow the path Settings > Accounts > Mobile data usage. Within this section, you can choose which option to go for: flagging “Use less data” will activate mobile data saving. Instead, the loading will not be affected when using wi-fi.
At this point, you will be able to take one more step: choose between different possibilities offered by the update. Tapping on the item Multimedia Content in high resolution will determine you will be able to choose between: “never”, “Mobile + Wi-fi” or “wi-fi only”. By choosing never, Instagram will not show the multimedia content in high resolution under any circumstances. Choosing wi-fi only, the app will only show high resolution media content when you are connected to a home or city network. If you choose mobile + wi-fi, the content will always be displayed in high resolution.
Selecting the “wi-fi only” option then will undoubtedly reduce data. Even more so if you choose “never”. These two modes guarantee a saving of data traffic. Instagram with the new feature wants to ensure all its members a great user experience, ensuring the loading of multimedia content without interruption (albeit slow and in low resolution) even in areas where there is not a good Internet connection.