The next time a Facebook user in India opens the app, the first thing they see may be a vertical video shot by a stranger rather than a post from a friend. Meta has begun testing a home screen that places Reels ahead of everything else, according to TechCrunch, reordering the social network’s oldest habit around the shortest format it now prizes.
The test is running in India, one of Facebook’s largest markets by users. It continues a multiyear campaign in which Meta has pushed short video toward the top of its apps wherever it competes with TikTok. India is a natural place to try the idea: the country blocked TikTok in 2020, and the audience it left behind became a prize that Meta, YouTube and a crowd of local apps all rushed to claim.
Meta did not say how many people are in the test or when it might expand. Changes of this kind usually reach a small share of users first, get measured, and are adjusted before any wider launch. The company has moved short video up the feed in stages rather than in a single leap, and the India experiment is the latest step on that path.
What is at stake is the format itself. Reels began as Instagram’s answer to TikTok, and Meta has treated vertical video as the product that keeps people inside its apps longer. The feed is engineered for engagement rather than reach alone, and video holds attention in a way the text-and-photo feed no longer does as reliably. Putting Reels first is a bet that the app should open with what people watch, not with what they post.
That bet runs against Facebook’s own history. The platform was built on the idea that the most important thing is what your friends are doing, and its feed long ranked those posts above all else. A video-first design softens that promise. A user who opens the app now may spend their first minutes with creators and clips that have nothing to do with their circle, a shift in what Facebook is for.
The change matters commercially, too. Short video is where advertising attention has migrated, and a feed that leads with Reels gives Meta more of the video inventory advertisers pay a premium for. Meta has said for several quarters that Reels ranks among its fastest-growing surfaces for ad impressions, and moving it to the front of the home screen in a market the size of India would deepen that pool.
The reordering also echoes a shift Meta has already made inside Instagram, where Reels has sat at the center of the app for years. Executives have described short video as the company’s most direct answer to TikTok, and the resources behind it have followed: more ranking weight, more creation tools, and more advertiser demand. What Facebook is now testing is whether the same logic transfers to an app whose users skew older and whose identity is tied to the network rather than to entertainment.
India’s particular circumstances make it the right proving ground. After the TikTok ban, a wave of local short-video apps rose and mostly faded, and Reels stepped into the gap. The country also holds one of the world’s largest bases of young, mobile-first users, the audience most fluent in vertical video. If a Reels-first home screen works anywhere, it works in India, which is why Meta tends to test new formats there before taking them global.
The risk is that a feed built for strangers can feel like a different product to longtime users. Facebook still counts on communities, groups and family updates to bring people back, and demoting those to make room for video could drive some users away even as it keeps others longer. Meta will be watching how much time people spend, and also whether the feed they now see still feels like their own.
For Meta, the test is another move in a contest with TikTok that has reshaped nearly every surface the company owns. Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook have all absorbed short video, and the format’s climb up the feed shows how thoroughly a rival’s invention has redefined the home screen. What began as a tab has become the first thing a user meets.
The India test will not be the final word. Meta typically runs such experiments for weeks or months, and the version that eventually ships, if one ships, may look different from the one being tried now. The direction is already clear: on Facebook, the video is moving to the front, and the feed is being rebuilt around it. The open question is whether the people who made Facebook what it is will follow.
