Instagram has announced Boomerang, a standalone video app that creates GIF-live videos just like the already known Vine. The Boomerang app is available for Android and iOS users from their respective app stores – Google Play Store and App Store.
The Boomerang app takes a burst of photos and combines them together into one-second videos that plays forward and backward in a loop. Videos can be shot in Portrait or Landscape modes, however everything has to happen within the app and the finished video is shareable across the different social media platforms.
While Boomerang is an app from Instagram, it doesn’t require having an account with the facebook-owned photo sharing platform to make use of the app. The offering has some similarities with the twitter-owned Vine which records up to six-second videos or the recently announced ‘Live Photos’ feature by Apple which debuted with the Apple iPhone 6S and 6S Plus.
This is not the first standalone app launched by Instagram, there is ‘Layout’ for making Collage photos; ‘Bolt’, a photo sharing app which functions just as Snapchat and there is another called ‘HyperLapse’ which makes time lapse videos using stabilization technology.
Currently Instagram has about 400 million monthly active users (MAUs) and users on the platform share over 80 million photos daily. The service costs facebook 1 Billion Dollars back in 2012 when they acquired the service.
