InSave

This is the part I think actually makes InSave different, so I wanted it to feel good. The problem: everyone’s got a graveyard of saved reels they’ll never see again. InSave lets you dig it up. You hand it the data file Instagram gives you when you ask for your stuff, and it lays out every reel you ever saved so you can grab the few that mattered and let the rest stay buried.

The thing I cared most about: your entire saved history never leaves your phone. It gets read right there on the device, and only the handful you actually choose to keep ever get sent anywhere. The graveyard is yours and it stays yours.

Two bugs nearly slipped through, The syncing code was telling itself “yep, saved that” for reels it had not actually saved, so on a bad day reels could just quietly disappear with no error to tell you. That’s the worst kind of bug, the silent one. Fixed it so it only ticks a reel off once it can actually see it stored. The second was smaller, hit “keep all from this person” twice and you’d get duplicates. Made it so keeping something twice does nothing the second time.

Where it landed: 46 tests passing, up from 20, and a clean build. The whole import-and-triage flow holds together end to end. Still to do on the real phone, feed it an actual Instagram export and confirm it really does make zero calls out to Instagram while you browse, which is the promise the whole privacy story rests on.

One lesson I’m taking, bugs are a pain in the a** when you dont even know where theyre coming from, bugs that lose your data while smiling at you is worse than one that crashes.

More to come!

First piece, and the most important one, because if saving a reel is even slightly annoying nobody will do it, me included. The goal was brutal: tap share, tap InSave, and you’re already back to scrolling. No screen, no typing, no “tag this now.” Under a second.

The part I’m quietly proud of, it does zero network on the way in. When you share a reel, everything happens right there on your phone (clean up the link, check you haven’t already saved it, write it down) and only later does it quietly sync in the background. Which means it works with no signal at all. Save a reel in a lift with no bars, it just works, and catches up when you’re back online.

The wall was a dumb one that I almost shipped past. The little “saved!” confirmation popup broke when offline, the one moment it most needed to work, because the page it lived on tried to load fresh and couldn’t. Fix was to bake that popup into the part of the app that’s always cached, so it shows up even with no connection. Annoying to find, satisfying to kill.

Where it stands 20 tests, all green, and a clean build. The save-while-offline-then-sync loop holds together. Real on-phone testing (does it actually show up in Instagram’s share menu, does it really feel under a second) is the next thing I have to check on the actual device, not just in tests. But hey thats not the only thing, there’s a lot more work to be done…