Meta Just Turned Facebook Into Reels — And India Is the First to Get It
Open Facebook in India right now, and for some users, there’s no News Feed waiting for you anymore. Just full-screen video, instantly.
Meta has quietly started testing a new “Reels-first” home screen in India (and Indonesia), where selected users land directly in a full-screen Reels feed the moment they open the app — not the scrollable Feed that’s defined Facebook for nearly two decades.
Here’s what’s actually happening:
→ Users in the test see a pop-up explaining that “Reels are now front and center” before being dropped into the new layout
→ The classic Feed hasn’t disappeared — it’s moved to a secondary tab, and users can opt out and switch back anytime
→ Facebook head Tom Alison first announced this plan in July, saying Meta would test it in “video-heavy countries” outside the US before a possible 2027 rollout at home
→ India is Facebook’s single largest market — over 400 million users — and Meta says 97%+ of surveyed Indian users watch video on its platforms daily, with daily engagement hitting 98% in urban areas and 94% in rural India
→ This isn’t Meta’s first move in this direction: every video upload is already treated as a Reel regardless of length, and Instagram ran a similar full-screen-video test in India and South Korea first
What’s notable here isn’t the feature itself — it’s the sequencing. Meta didn’t launch this in the US, its most scrutinized and ad-lucrative market. It launched it in India first, at massive scale, with an easy opt-out built in, specifically so it can measure real engagement data before deciding whether to bring it home. That’s a deliberate, lower-risk way to test whether “video-first” actually beats “feed-first” at keeping people on the app longer — without betting the core US product on the answer yet.
It also tells you something about where Meta thinks the future of Facebook sits: not text posts, not photo albums, not even a mixed feed — but the same short-form video format that TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are all already fighting over.
If this became permanent, would you want Facebook to open straight into video — or do you still want the classic feed as your front door?
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