Instagram is very much a success story in the world of social media, startups and internet enterprises in general. With a $500,000 seed funding, first million users in 2.5 months, a $1 billion acquisition, and a current strength of more than 300 million monthly active users, Instagram is every developer/entrepreneur’s dream.
However, it is very frustrating how it is very backward on the iOS platform despite first being launched on that operating system 5 years ago.
The most obvious problem with Instagram for iOS is the absence of an iPad version of the app. For a company valued at $35 billion, an iPad iteration of its popular app should not be an issue. Of course the iPhone version can be used on an iPad but as every iOS user knows an iPhone app becomes pixelated and ugly when it is expanded to fit the larger screen of a tablet. For a smaller company, this is an oversight that can be allowed, but with the size of Instagram, it shouldn’t take a genius to port the app successfully to a bigger screen.
If Instagram does not want to spend much time on creating an iPad version of Instagram, they could as easily create an app that properly fills out the whole screen of a tablet, while keeping the UI crystal clear. For example,
This will be as simple as porting the web version of the service at https://instagram.com/.
But then again, a company like Instagram should be able to do an app properly as opposed to going for what is easy. A proper Instagram app for iPad should be one that takes advantage of the plenty real estate on the device’s screen. Here is an amazing concept from Robin Clediere.
Other smaller features could also make the app easy to use on even the iPhone. For example, once a user views a video on the Android version of Instagram, the video is saved to the device’s cache. Going back to the video again results in instant playback, with no need to buffer and stream as it did the first time when the video was viewed. This is not so for the iOS version of Instagram. Even if a video was just watched, a quick scroll down and coming back to the video will result in streaming the video straight from the web again.
The final one I think is the most annoying for me. One can only upload photos to Instagram from within the app.
In iOS 8, Apple made it possible for developers to add sharing extensions that allow media in the Photo Library to be shared on their apps. Though Apple is partly to blame for taking so long to bring this feature to iOS (this has been available on the earliest versions of Android and Blackberry while Apple was limiting sharing to Mail, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook), Instagram should have taken advantage of this feature as soon as its release in September 2014.
What this means is an extra step for a user who is taking photos from the Camera app and looking to upload the photos immediately. While it should be as easy as taking several photos via the Camera app, viewing it directly on the Camera app and choosing the best one and clicking share to upload on Instagram; it becomes a more cumbersome process where you will have to exit the camera, go to Instagram, wait for it to load before selecting a picture for upload.
These might not be big deals to Instagram users on iOS judging from the growing popularity of the service among Apple users, but it is one where users who have used the app on a better platform are sure to get irritated about.
Image Credit: Robin Clediere, Instagram
