Popular social network Pinterest has today announced a major update to its iOS app. In a blog post, the company detailed all of the changes coming with today’s update, including a refreshed interface, better localization for different markets, and more.
Pinterest says that this update is a “near complete rewrite” of the app, which means there’s a variety of visual and under-the-hood enhancements. As far as the visual changes go, users will notice that there’s a renewed focus on Pins with the updated design. As you can see in the image above, the overarching idea of the app is the same, but there have been a handful of enhancements. There are additionally a variety of new animations in the app that the company says were built in an “informant” way to ensure that they don’t affect the app’s performance.
The biggest changes to the Pinterest app with today’s update, however, come under-the-hood. Thanks to the complete rewrite, the app is much faster to load. Now, when users open the app, their home feed will load up to 3 times faster according to the company. It also says it has used a new design system that allows the app to better scale to the growing number of iOS screen sizes that are being used daily.
Pinterest details much of the under-the-hood overhaul on its Engineering website:
A small team of Pinterest iOS engineers was recently given the opportunity every engineer dreams of – completely rethinking and rebuilding our app. We’ve grown so much that it’s created a high demand on our platform. In order to reach our next 100 million Pinners around the world, we re-architected our platform from the ground up with a framework that’s faster to build in, easier to scale and up to 3x faster for Pinners in many different scenarios. Here’s a look at some of the larger pieces of the project, with more to be published the coming weeks.
Because of the complete rewrite, Pinterest says that it will now be quicker and easy for it to continue enhancing the app. The latest version of Pinterest is available on the App Store. The full changelog is below:
– A new modern look that lets you focus more on Pins.
– Universally readable, in 31 languages. Kanji, Roman, Cyrillic—now our app is legible no matter what language you read or what screen size you have.
– Crazy fast loading, for everyone in the world. When you open the app, your home feed now loads up to 3 times faster.
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This new iOS Pinterest 2016 app panders to the facility of the device and negates the intentions of the user. Collecting and marveling at scraps is easy but figuring out who is discriminatory or evaluating the character of which pinners to follow has become much much much harder.
The app now shows your boards as your most recent pins and the pins you’ve chosen to stand for each board is gone. Too bad if you’ve had an off day when someone looks at your stuff. Any caption a user has added is also mostly hidden when browsing so further context is lost. This version of the app has negated any effort a Pinner has attempted in putting forward an identity for themselves.
This version has reduced Pinterest back to a common scrapbook and removed any meaningful differentiation from any other scrapbooking app. Soon the only ads will be for wrinkle removal and other crap you get on bad web sites. If you only want to hoard pictures it’s great – for anything else it’s now terrible. Its reduced Pinterest back to just an image thief and a platform for ads.
I totally agree with stooryduster’s comment below. The new changes to Pinterest have taken away any individuality one may have had on the site. All socialization with others on the dash or in pins has been negated, because, as I understand it, they are taking away the ability to comment at all on a pin at some point. The message capability will be the only place someone can converse. Being the member of a fandom where we post pictures from a show and talk about episodes will be impossible once the comment section is deleted. It is not a social media site, it is a SALES site, let no mistake be made. Not being able to see who of my followers are repinning from me has taken all the fun out of it. I had a long five year run, but it’s no fun anymore. It’s pretty pointless.