Here's why Instagram quietly restricts 'daily time limit' option

New Delhi: Instagram introduced a 'Your Activity' feature on its platform in 2018 that allowed users to set daily time limitations on their app usage. Users might also temporarily disable push notifications. Instagram has quietly doubled the minimum daily time limit for its Your Activity feature nearly three years later.

Instagram is sending pop-ups to its users, as first noticed by TechCrunch, encouraging them to alter their daily limit value in accordance with an app update. The popup informs consumers that they can preserve their current restriction if they so desire. However, selecting the edit button brings them to a preset choice, where the lowest value is 30 minutes, as opposed to the lower value of 10 minutes that was previously available. In addition, on the activity page, Instagram displays a second popup informing users that the 10-minute value is "no longer supported."

According to a separate report by The Verge, the Instagram prompt now offers daily time limits of 30 minutes, 45 minutes, one hour, two hours, and three hours. Previously, users could set time limits of 10 minutes and 15 minutes to limit their daily use of the app.

Notably, when Instagram originally introduced Your Activity settings for its users, digital businesses all around the world were being chastised for their addictive nature and the impact they were having on their customers' well-being. In response to these and other concerns, Instagram introduced tools that allowed users to intentionally limit their time spent in the app by setting a time limit as low as 10 minutes.

Contrary to popular belief, Meta is now urging users to spend more time on Instagram. Interestingly, this breakthrough comes at a time when Facebook's growth has stalled and its daily active user population has shrunk for the first time since its inception — an occurrence that has wiped out 20% of Meta's worth. Instagram is now encouraging users to spend more time on the platform by boosting the minimum daily limit, in the hopes of correcting some of the worrisome stats from the previous quarter.