Fearing death, Vine adds the one feature they should have had when they launched

Starting your own social network from scratch has never been easy but despite all its shortcomings, Vine has proven it’s had some sort of staying power when it comes to user generated content (a testament to restrictions they placed early on).

Since the beginning, Vine has required users capture video footage as it happened. There is no upload function in the app, only record. In some ways, this kept Vine “pure” with original user generated content, forcing users to think about what they wanted to record ahead of time, then — like any budding film maker — recording take after take in order to get everything just right. When it came to creative types, this was discovered fairly early on and Vine became a sort of proving ground or platform for young people looking to gain some sort of internet fame. And it’s been working really well in that regard.

After introducing Loop Counts a few weeks back, Vine is back again with an update that allows users to finally do exactly what they’ve been asking since days 1: upload videos from their device’s gallery/camera roll. The all new Vine camera is coming first to iOS and even adds a few new useful features like focus lock and torch mode, helpful when making your 6 second movies. An Android release was also mentioned, but specific timing wasn’t specified.

While a feature like this may have killed the social network in its early days (we suspected the reason it was forbidden early on is because Vine was trying to avoid users uploading copyrighted material), things have changed. Not only are there 3rd party apps that allow users to upload videos from their camera roll, but nothing was stopping users from simply recording video from the internet on their phone’s camera. This, coupled with a drop off of users fleeing for Snapchats and IGs and well, it just makes sense.

Without this restriction (and that’s exactly what it was) finally removed, expect to see a significant shift in Vine content from here on out. Whether it will be for the better is anyone’s guess, but this should help get more people on board Vine and start winging them off rival services like Instagram.