Why Are My Messages Blue in Instagram?

Evan Gower April 3, 2020

Have your Instagram messages recently changed color? You grabbed your phone one day to send someone a DM, and you noticed that your messages turned from gray to blue or purple. What’s going on?

Some people love this new feature, while others find it hard to adapt to change. The most interesting part is that this hasn’t happened to all Instagram users yet. There are many possible reasons, as we’ll explain in this article.

Background Story

Instagram started experimenting with the color of the messages in September 2019. New colors were slowly rolled out to see the users’ reactions. This change didn’t go unnoticed. It seems that there are two types of people: those who love new DMs and those who hate them.

Some users, especially younger ones, embraced this change. It was a time that DMs became more modern! On the other hand, some people don’t like it when things change. They find new messages somewhat confusing, and they’re not sure whether this change was necessary.

Possible Reasons

As usual, Instagram didn’t come up with an official explanation. However, that doesn’t stop users and social media experts from guessing. We’re going to present to you what we believe are the most probable reasons for this change.

Distinguish Sent and Received Messages

You have probably noticed that only the messages you send have a different appearance. If you send several in a row, their color usually fades from purple to blue. However, the ones that you receive haven’t changed a bit; they’re still gray.

Some people believe that this change is supposed to make chatting easier. It can help users distinguish sent from received messages, which turns out to be very useful when you’re in a hurry.

Inspired by Facebook Messenger

When they first appeared, Facebook and Instagram were two completely different apps. Since Facebook bought Instagram, we can see that they tend to look more alike and even introduce similar features. Just look at Facebook stories!

In the beginning, Instagram didn’t even have private messages. They first added a limited messaging option and have worked on improving it ever since. Today, many people use Instagram DMs to chat with their friends daily.

If you use Facebook Messenger, you know that messages have been blue for a while. It’s possible that Instagram was inspired by this and wanted to do something similar with its chat section.

On Facebook Messenger, it’s possible to change the color of your messages to any color you wish. Instagram might follow the cue here as well and allow everyone to choose the color they like.

Design Change

Maybe the reason is something simple, and we shouldn’t look for complicated explanations. Maybe Instagram managers were fed up with old DMs and decided it was time to change something. Just like when they suddenly changed the app logo a couple of years ago.

Many users didn’t approve of the new logo and asked Instagram to switch back to the previous one. However, with time we all get used to it, and many people don’t even remember how the old logo looked like.

The same thing will probably happen with the messages. Again, no one knows why they’ve chosen the blue color and not green or yellow instead. The only possible explanation we have is that they wanted to make it similar to Facebook Messenger. However, we’ll never know the truth unless Instagram comes out with an official statement.

Blue Messages Are Here to Stay

Whether you like them or not, blue messages are here to stay. At least, that’s how it seems. Instagram has no intention of going back to gray for now. You can expect to get blue messages soon if you haven’t got them already.

What do you think about the new color of messages? Which version do you prefer, gray or blue? Feel free to share your opinion in the comments section below.