Instagram tests a serious Boomerang upgrade

It looks like Instagram is getting ready to finally revamp one of its most popular features: Boomerang.

Instagram is readying as many as five new styles of looping video for its app, according to code discovered in its Android app.

The new effects were spotted by researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who has a solid track record of uncovering unreleased features in social media apps. According to her findings, here are some of the new types of Boomerang effects coming to Instagram:

• “Hold,” which puts a slight delay at the end of a clip so there’s a bit of a pause between loops

• “Dynamic,” which speeds up at the end of the clip

• “Slowmo,” which loops the clip in slow motion

• Two called “duo,” which appear to be more like a classic Boomerang, just set at different speeds

Those may not sound like huge changes, but they could open up a lot of new possibilities for Boomerangs, which have looked pretty much the same since Instagram first introduced the feature in 2015. You can get a better idea of what these might look like in action on Wong’s blog.

An Instagram spokesperson declined to comment. 

Besides the new Boomerang features, Wong uncovered a few other intriguing changes. One would add Instagram’s Layout, the app that lets you make photo collages, to the Stories camera. Another would allow users to send comments to friends the same way you can share a post via direct messages.

Another long overdue feature she spotted: notification filters. Instead of one endless list of all your notifications, which can be especially overwhelming if you have a big following, filters would let you sort notifications by type.

No word on when these features might be officially released, but if they’re as close to being ready as Wong suggests, we might not have much longer to wait.