Tumblr for iOS now supports sharing Live Photos & 3D Touch
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac :
Context & Ripple Effects
Tumblr's move puts it at the front of a wave of third-party adoption for Apple's iPhone-native photo format. Within days of the iOS update, Facebook began rolling out its own Live Photos support, confirming that major social platforms saw the format as table stakes for iPhone users.
The arc continued on Tumblr's side too: less than a year later it brought Live Photos to the web and open-sourced its tooling so other developers could do the same, turning an iOS-only feature into a cross-platform capability.
First-order effects
- Tumblr's iPhone users gain native sharing of Live Photos with 3D Touch quick actions, removing the need to flatten the animated images before posting.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's rollout of Live Photos support shortly after signals competitive follow-on — platforms that ignore Apple's capture formats risk looking stale to iPhone-heavy user bases, a path Twitter eventually took when it added Live Photo uploads as GIFs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, iOS-native media formats stop being platform lock-in: Tumblr's web support and open-source tooling show social networks absorbing Apple formats into their own infrastructure, decoupling the feature from the device.
The trend: Social platforms are progressively adopting Apple's device-native capture formats, moving from iOS app support to web and open-source implementations.