✨ What's new?

• Support for Instagram version 444.0.0

Languages

• Sparkle is now translated into 16 more languages, downloaded from the release page and imported in Settings as language packs
• Import several packs at once from the Files picker, see each one's coverage in the list, and remove one with a swipe
• A pack overrides a shipped catalog of the same language, so a translator can preview their corrections on device
• New Help Translate entry and a contributor guide for anyone who wants to improve a language

Interface

• Tab Editor: the launch tab, icon order, swipe behavior, per-tab hiding and messages-only mode collapse into one screen that stages the whole bar with a live preview and applies it in a single action
• Saved is its own tab entry now rather than a Reels replacement, borrowing a hidden tab's slot in the custom layout
• Hiding the tab bar generalizes from messages-only to any single-tab configuration, and is refused where it would leave no way into Sparkle settings
• App Font: import an .otf, .ttf or .ttc and set both Instagram and Sparkle in it, previewed face by face with alphabet and figure lines before you pick

Stories

• Hide Recent Highlights: resurfaced highlights are dropped from the tray, from tapping forward, and from swiping sideways, since all three read a different list
• Filter your viewer list (Don't Follow You / You Follow / You Don't Follow / Starred) and star the people you look for
• Mention Count Badge: how many unique accounts a story mentions, redacted along with the glyph by Hide UI on Capture
• Story Audio Button: mute or unmute a story from the viewer, restoring the previous audio state on close so Feed and Reels stay isolated

Messages

• Activity notifications: online, offline, typing and read events from tracked users, with per-account lists, group-aware context and their own settings page
• Audio and upload rows expand as native submenus instead of opening an action sheet over the thread
• Look up a GIF's real name and channel from the comment and Direct menus (off by default, since each uncached lookup tells giphy.com which GIF is on screen)

Instants

• Confirm a recorded video before Instagram sends it, with the camera feed preserved if you cancel. Photo instants remain unsupported
• Toggle instant auto-save for an account straight from the action menu, which also saves the instant already on screen

Media

• Select Text in Photos: Sparkle's own select-text button and Copy All capsule replace VisionKit's, with real Liquid Glass on iOS 26 and the info overlay stepping aside while text is highlighted

Reels

• Hide Viewer Comment Bar: removes the bottom comment field from the reels viewer

Settings

• Contextual information sheets opened from section headers, in place of long footers, and included in settings search
• Sparkle's own lists use Instagram's follow control, gaining the Requested and Follow back states the previous two-state button could not express

🛠 Fixes & Improvements

• Rootful packages install to /Library again. A makefile variable overrode the build environment, so both build paths produced rootless packages and the "rootful" debs in v1.1.0 and v1.2.0 unpacked to /var/jb
• Inbox seen menu and message preview unlock work again on latest Instagram, which ships a second inbox controller behind a server experiment
• The reels header hides again on the navigation bar the viewer actually uses, and comes back when the preference is turned off instead of staying gone until relaunch
• Explore and recent-search hiding repaired
• Reels opened from a profile scroll freely instead of hitting the doom-scroll cap, which now applies only to the Reels home and tab feeds
• Stories get marked as seen again
• A story no longer lists the same account several times over on a reshare, and follow state is no longer read off a localized button title
• Fixed a crash around message reactions
• Gallery backups that need a schema migration import again, including pre-rename stores. The backup file itself is never modified
• Gallery import rows update when a thumbnail finishes off screen, and retry after a render that came back empty
• Clearing finished download history is scoped to the current account
• Unfollowing asks for confirmation again now that the follow controller moved to Swift, and every prompt is worded from the account's actual state instead of announcing an unfollow as a follow
• Instants act on the media actually on screen, and keep their expanded order across sessions
• Notifications reach the right account on sideloaded multi-account installs instead of arriving generic or claiming the account is logged out
• Uploaded audio shows its real waveform instead of a static pattern
• Copied links no longer carry the igsi tracking parameter
• FFmpeg frameworks are signed correctly for each output path, and bundle resources resolve per file so encoding still works on development installs
• Bundled resources stay readable when the package is installed as root