Instagram for Android

Android users rejoice, Instagram has finally arrived!

By now, every site on the Internet has a comparison of the iOS and Android interface. So… I’ll just toss these right here.

The two apps are very much alike, but not exact copies. This isn’t a bad thing, you want the app to be similar but still follow some of the OS design standards. For the most part, I feel the Instagram team did well.

The biggest issue I see is the awkward grid/list selector in the middle of the profile page (see picture #3). On iOS, this is handled with a low key toggle in the header, something I assume could not be done on Android. I find this single UI choice makes the profile page rather hard to look at.

The ability to apply blur/tilt shift effects to pictures is absent in the Android app. That is, as far as I can tell, the only thing that is missing from the iOS version. I can only guess that rendering this effect must be too intensive on lower powered devices and was left off for that reason.

Overall, the reaction to Instagram for Android seems to be mixed. There are the angry iPhone users who feel their turf has been invaded, the anti-filter crowd who hate Instagram all together, and the Android users who have been dying for this app to be released. If anything, we should be asking how they’re going to afford the extra bandwidth and storage space for this free service with no visible revenue stream.

At the end of the day, we’re all posting heavily filtered pictures taken by a phone. Getting up in arms about the operating system or camera quality seems like a waste of time.