Skip to main content

This simple ‘hack’ brings back Instagram’s original, beloved icon

instagram hack old icon food headgear
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Earlier this week, Instagram rolled out an updated user interface focusing on monochromatic, flat design – except for the icon itself, which received a very colorful makeover.

The new icon has unified the look of Instagram’s three apps, bringing it in line with the Hyperlapse, Boomerang, Layout icons. Coincidentally (perhaps), it also closely resembles Apple’s own icons that received the rainbow gradient treatment in iOS 9. Not everyone is pleased with that decision, however. Luckily, for those who wish for a return to the days of yore, UX designer Juan Ramirez has come up with a hack to restore the legacy Instagram icon on iOS devices.

Recommended Videos

To be clear, this isn’t the type of hack that’s going to damage your phone. You don’t have to jailbreak anything, and it’s perfectly safe. As reported by BGR, it works by taking advantage of a trick in iOS that allows for webpage shortcuts to open apps, shortcuts that can be pinned to a user’s home screen. Ramirez simply created a shortcut that launches Instagram, while using the classic icon to represent the web app. On his website, he laments that, alas, there is nothing he can do about changing the icon when it shows up in other places, such as in push notifications.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

To revert to ye olde Instagram icon, simply squirrel the app away in a folder you’ll never look at, navigate to Ramirez’s shortcut webpage (make sure you’re on Safari on iOS), and then simply follow the onscreen instructions to save the web app to your home screen. Voilà!

For some, this may seem like much ado about nothing – does it really matter what icons look like? – but our smartphones have become intrinsically linked to our daily lives. They comfort us, console us, and when things change, some of us panic. It’s reassuring to know that people like Ramirez are out there, fighting the good fight and keeping us sane.

Daven Mathies
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Daven is a contributing writer to the photography section. He has been with Digital Trends since 2016 and has been writing…
Instagram’s Take a Break feature will nudge teens to spend less time on the app
Instagram login screen on an iPhone.

Instagram today announced the launch of several measures aimed at making the platform safer for teenagers. Most of these measures come in the form of new features that will be implemented throughout  2022. The first of these features -- called "Take a Break" -- will go live in select countries today.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri first announced the feature in November and teased an expected December rollout. Take a Break, which needs to be turned on manually from Instagram settings, encourages users to spend time away from the app once they reach a preset time limit. Users can set the timer to 10 minutes, 20 minutes, or 30 minutes. Once users reach this limit, the app sends a full-screen alert telling them to take a break from the app. Users will need to tap on the Done button to remove the alert and get back to the app.

Read more
Instagram back up after second major outage of the week
Instagram login screen.

Facebook started off the week with one heck of a blunder, watching all of its services go down worldwide for over six hours. Now, to close out the week, Facebook-owned Instagram had another large-scale outage that lasted multiple hours. People started to notice issues with Instagram not loading or refreshing around 2 p.m. ET, and the problems seemed to be sporadic -- but a wave of reports made it clear there was a mojor problem.

Over on Twitter, both #instagramdownagain and #instadown were trending for the duration. That doesn't happen for a small or short blip.

Read more
Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are back after several hours offline
facebook hacked

Well, here's one way to start a week off on the wrong foot: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram were all down for several hours on Monday. Yes, completely down. Starting at roughly 9 a.m. PT, Downdetector started to show a sharp spike in reports of outages -- though as we look back, users were discussing unsent messages and broken apps even earlier.

As of 4 p.m. PT, the services had for the most part returned to working order, albeit with some cobwebs left to shake out, leaving everyone collectively scratching their heads and wondering how an outage of this scale happened.

Read more