Instagram has quietly unveiled its new "one-tap" messaging app, Bolt, for iOS and Android. The app lets you quickly send a photo (or video) to a friend, which then disappears once it's been read. Bolt is essentially a carbon copy of buzzy messaging app Taptalk, although a lot prettier. Tap on a friend's face to send a photo instantly, or long-press on their face to send a video. Shake your phone to undo an accidental Bolt. But there's a catch: Bolt is for now only available in New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa.

"We're going to other regions soon, but are starting with a handful of countries to make sure we can scale the experience," an Instagram spokesman tells The Verge. "Instagram has 65 percent of its users overseas, so an international launch, while different, is actually not all that out of order with what we do." The spokesperson elaborated that the three countries were chosen for their geographical diversity, but also for their tight-knit communities, which Bolt hopes to piggyback on. Bolt, like Taptalk, only lets you send messages to one person at a time, which makes it most useful for sending quick photos or videos to a small number of people. The favorites bar at the bottom of Bolt only holds four friends, after all, though you can add up to 20, a list of which you can access with a swipe.

You could hypothesize that a Facebook executive asked Facebook and Instagram to start spewing out ephemeral messaging apps, but I think Bolt came from elsewhere. Instagram still operates largely as an independent company within Facebook, we're told, making its own decisions on most everything. Bolt, for example, includes no Facebook log-in. To find friends, you have to sync phone numbers from your contact list, like with Snapchat or WhatsApp. So, I think Bolt addresses a desire within Instagram to create a sharing tool that's fast and casual. Snapchat has a fraction of Instagram's user base, but its users share far more — more than half a billion snaps per day, versus 60 million Instagram posts.

Instagram proper serves a different purpose from Snapchat, but that doesn't mean Instagram doesn't want to expand what it can do. The company's Instagram Direct feature, for example, lets you send a photo privately to up to 15 people. Direct is useful to some — 45 million people use the feature every month, Instagram says — but it fits an odd niche. Direct lets you send photos privately, but slowly. Bolt aims to let you share privately, but very quickly, and only with one person at a time. The unique sharing model was pioneered by Taptalk, and was recently adopted by several other new apps including Mirage, which comes from the makers of Yo. Bolt in fact looks more like Mirage than Taptalk.

Instagram doesn't seem to have any qualms about imitating any of the apps that inspired it. "When Instagram itself launched four years ago, we weren't the first photo filter app," said a spokesman. "Our tradition is that we look at a space and create a super simple, pretty experience to fit it."

It seems that before Bolt has even made its way to the States, it's already finding itself in a heap of drama. The drama ultimately won't matter, however, if Bolt is genuinely useful to millions of people. And Instagram certainly hopes it will be. "This isn't a side project," said the Instagram spokesperson. "We are totally behind this thing."