You should probably stay away from the Instagram Wrapped app
I will keep it simple. Stay away from wrapped-for-Instagram trends. The app has been circling the top bracket of the App Store for the past few days, and the premise is too attractive to ignore at first.
You may see your friends online showing off their wrapped stats, but before you go and join in the “fun” for yourself, please consider the following first.
What is Wrapped for Instagram App?
just like Following Spotify’s own “Wrapped” system that provides information about your music streaming habits for an entire year, the new Wrapped app also provides information about your Instagram usage trends.
It tells you how many hours you spent on Instagram in 2023, your top online friends, the number of people who blocked you, and more. In real life, those stats aren’t particularly accurate, and there’s no explanation as to how the app is making those calculations.
Now, before you go ahead and install it, you might want to take a look at my own experience and how the app works. I installed the app last night and gave it access to my Instagram account. I woke up today to find that I was logged out of that account on my iPhone.
A healthy group of users have also expressed concerns on Reddit and other social platforms that the app is collecting login credentials to steal data and hack accounts. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Wrapped works, but it’s a terrible lie
When you launch the Wrapped app for the first time, it asks you to connect your Instagram account by entering your login credentials. Once authenticated, it shows you some interesting account statistics, as shown below.
My sister’s account tops the list of three accounts curated by the app as “Your Top Friends of 2023.” But here’s the fun part. We exchange barely one or two memes a month in the DM section. I don’t even watch his Instagram stories. In the third situation is a former coworker who only shares one or two posts per week, if at all, but I never interact with their stories.
In second place is a friend with whom I connect on a daily basis, and more so than anyone in my mutual circle. Then the app tells me I spent over 660 hours on Instagram last year. The screen time settings on my phone tell me that my weekly time spent on Instagram is less than two hours.
I also know that, in reality, I don’t spend more than two (or at most three) hours per week on Instagram. That means my 2023 Instagram hours shouldn’t exceed 200 hours even by the most generous estimate. Here the Wrapped for Instagram app is off in its estimation with an error margin of at least 200%. And I’m not the only one who sees glaring inaccuracies.
The app also gives you a list of the three accounts that viewed my profile, how many accounts took screenshots of my posts, and how many users blocked me. The app claims to provide more detailed information but hides them behind a paid Diamond subscription. has reached out to the developers’ account on Instagram for more information and will update this post when we hear back.
Is Instagram Wrapped App a Scam?
Instagram developer website.” style=”aspect-ratio: 1.5″/>Talking about the developer, Wrapped Labs has no online presence. The developer’s website listed on the App Store leads to a non-working web URL. Another questionable element here is that instead of a dedicated website for the app or the developer’s business, what we have is a link to Instagram-Privacy-Policy-1e58df6e39974e80b1a28f1592bca381″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Considerations page documenting the app’s privacy policy.
But there are some red flags here too. “For a better experience, when using our service, we may require you to provide us with certain personally identifiable information,” the disclosure says. This is a worrying announcement because handing over such personal data to a third-party app is a bad idea.
It’s also worth pointing out that the developer account on Instagram that I shot her as a DM to last night is nowhere to be seen today. The app’s start-up page says all analysis happens on the device and the developer team doesn’t get access to any of your log-in information, but history tells a different story with many scam apps that have surfaced in the past Similar promises.
If that wasn’t enough evidence to turn you away from the Wrapped app, received this comment from a Meta spokesperson when asked about the app:
“This app violates our terms and we’ve asked Apple to remove it from the App Store.”
Nothing more can be made clear than that.
Why should you stay away from Wrapped?
Look, linking any third-party app to your social media account is never a good idea. And when that app is something like Instagram – where you post a lot of personal content – you should proceed with extreme caution. Here are some of the concerns about the app that are all over social media:
You may ask why something like Spotify Wrapped is safe, but Wrapped for Instagram is not. Well, first of all, Spotify Wrapped is an in-house tool, which means that your music streaming data is only accessed by tools made by Spotify and which run on the company’s own servers. In the case of Wrapped for Instagram, it’s an external app from a developer we’ve never heard of.
Second, Spotify Wrapped is accurate, but this suspicious Instagram-linked app is anything but. Plus, we live in the age of generative AI, and it’s very easy to lift content from Instagram profiles and morph it. As this report points out, such cases are already occurring in the US Washington Post.
Everything about the Wrapped for Instagram app seems fishy and a sign of dire danger. I would strongly suggest that you stay away from vanity Instagram usage statistics in favor of keeping your social media account intact and keeping your privacy intact. And judging by what Meta tells us, it may be just a matter of time before Instagram gets booted from the App Store forever.
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