Instagram for Android Hits the Market, Lacks Certain Features and Tablet Support
Instagram, possibly the most popular photo sharing app on Apple app store of all time, has finally come to Android platform after more than a year of waiting and months of speculation. Instagram released the first version for Android users, which is already available on Google Play for free.
On the launch of the Android version, Instagram has also released a bunch of stats. The app user base has grown to 30 million+ registered users in the 18 months since launch. Instagram currently has over five million photos uploaded per day, or around 150 million per month. There are currently almost one billion photos on the social photo sharing platform. On the day of launch of Android version, Instagram had over 430k people who had signed up on their waiting list.
As expected, Instagram for Android seems to work just like the iOS version – it lets users take pictures, then edit an image with various filters. Photos can then be uploaded to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram’s own site. There are still some features like tilt shift and blur, Share from Feed, Live Preview and Share to Flickr that have not been included in this first version of the Android app, but the company promised to add these in the future upgrades.
Instagram runs on Android devices with version 2.2 or higher with supports for OpenGL ES 2.0. Instagram for Android cannot be run on tablet devices at this time.
“We’ve already seen more than 30 million people join Instagram to create and share beautiful photos on their iOS devices, and now we’re thrilled to offer a way for Android users to join their iOS friends on Instagram to share their photos with the world,” the company said in a blog post.
Instagram was originally released exclusively on Apple’s iOS platform in October 2010, and has been hugely popular, having been named Apple’s app of the year for 2011. Since its inception, Instagram has added rich photo editing features like new and live filters, instant tilt shift, high resolution photos, optional borders, one click rotation and an updated icon.
But Instagram wasn’t the first and isn’t the only photo app for mobile phones, and Android users have had a range of alternatives to choose from while waiting for Instagram to hit Google Play. Most popular of these are Streamzoo (from Phonezoo Communications, Inc.), Pixlr-O-Matic (from Autodesk), Hipster (from Hipster) and Lightbox Photos (from Lightbox).
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