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This designer perfectly captured the obnoxious spread of Stories

This designer perfectly captured the obnoxious spread of Stories

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Apple Music Stories and Apple Maps Stories mockups by Rafael Conde
Rafael Conde

If we’re all very unlucky, this could be what the biggest app updates of 2017 look like:

Product designer Rafael Conde, who leads design at Netlify and co-hosts the LayoutFM podcast, mocked up what Stories would look like inside a series of other apps to point out the absurdity of the format spreading so far and so quickly.

“This started when I was talking to my co-host Kevin Clark, on the LayoutFM podcast, about the ‘Stories’ as a format, not a feature, and how Facebook seems to be exploring this on all their apps,” Conde told The Verge over Twitter. “I also feel a lot like an old man, in which I really don’t get the huge appeal of Stories, and I thought it would be funny to see how far we could go — hence the storm of tweets.”

Stories are fun, but they don’t need to be everywhere

The Stories format started inside Snapchat, where it’s been a huge hit as a way to quickly see clips of what other people are up to. But it’s not something that needs to be inside every app — and it looks like Facebook is determined to find that out the hard way.

So far, we’ve seen Facebook shamelessly clone Stories inside of nearly all of its big apps. Its clone inside Instagram, Instagram Stories, has actually become a legitimate Snapchat competitor. But its clone inside of Facebook Messenger has prompted complaints of bloating the app, and its clone inside of WhatsApp went so poorly, the team reversed course. It’s looking at adding Stories to the main Facebook app, too.

Thankfully, it’s only Facebook that’s ripping off Snapchat Stories so far. But given how much the rest of the tech industry loves to borrow from Snapchat, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see this go further.

The best thing about Conde’s mock-ups is just how plausible they all feel. Apple Music Stories could totally happen. Maps Stories feel like a stretch, but why not? And Stories look great inside of Slack.

I just hope, it doesn’t get this bad: