3 apps Facebook just copied to stop you leaving [2026]

Meta shed 20 million users in the first three months of 2026, according to the company’s own data. Facebook’s response isn’t original. It’s borrowed, feature by feature, from the apps eating its lunch.

Facebook head Tom Alison said the platform will start testing a “reimagined experience” later this year, one that drops a subset of users into “full-screen video the moment they open the app.” If that sounds like opening TikTok, that’s the idea.

The full-screen feed nobody asked Facebook for

Meta didn’t show what the new interface looks like. No screenshots, no demo, nothing beyond the pitch. The company says it’ll roll out first to countries with a noted preference for video content, and a potential US expansion is planned for next year.

The stated reason, from Facebook: “video is where conversations are happening, communities are forming, and even commerce is starting to take place.” Read it twice and it lands less like a vision and more like an admission. The conversations moved somewhere else. Facebook is trying to catch up to them.

And it’s done this before. Meta launched Reels for Instagram in 2020 to fight TikTok on Instagram’s turf. Now it’s running the same playbook on its oldest, largest property.

Alison said the opposite in 2022

Here’s the part worth sitting with. In 2022, Alison told The Verge he saw “TikTok chasing Facebook,” not the other way around. Four years later, Facebook is building a video feed that opens the way TikTok does. You can draw your own conclusion about who was chasing whom.

The raw numbers explain the panic. Facebook is reportedly still the most popular social platform in the world, but YouTube sits close behind, and TikTok isn’t far off either. TikTok crossed 1 billion monthly users three years after launch, faster than Facebook managed the same milestone. Meta doesn’t break out figures for its individual platforms, which makes that 20 million collective loss the number to watch.

Seller is Craigslist, Forum is Reddit

The video feed isn’t the only impersonation shipping this year. Today Facebook is launching Seller, a Craigslist-style app built for Marketplace sellers to track performance, manage listings and message buyers in one place.

It follows Forum, which Facebook launched earlier this year as a dedicated home for Facebook Groups. In practice it looks a lot like subreddit communities on Reddit, just with Meta’s branding on top. Three rivals, three cloned experiences, one company doing the copying.

A free verified badge, if you’ll show your face

Verification is changing too. Facebook’s blue check has meant paying for Meta Verified, which starts at $11.99 per month. Now the company says it’s offering a free verified badge you can earn through a “simple selfie verification” process, meant to signal that a profile is linked to a real person.

That’s the trade. Hand over a selfie, skip the subscription. Whether users see a free badge as reassurance or as one more face scan feeding Meta is the open question, and the company isn’t the neutral party to answer it.

If you actually use Facebook, one launch here earns your attention over the rest. Seller is the practical tool, a real reason for Marketplace sellers to open the app. The full-screen video feed is the tell. When a platform this large starts opening like the app taking its users, it’s not confident. It’s cornered.