You may have already heard about Instagram, which has been owned by Meta, since it’s been one of the most popular photo/video-sharing services of all time. Instagram originally launched in 2010 – the same year that the original iPad debuted as well as the iPhone 4, which remarkably raised the bar when it comes to camera quality of any smartphone back then. Instagram initially launched an iOS app, but since then, Instagram has been infamously criticized for never offering an iPad app for its service. Even other mainstream social media services have offered iPad apps for years, including Facebook, which is also owned by Meta. Just last week, Meta launched an iPad version of WhatsApp. What that said, we could finally see the iPad app for Instagram sooner rather than later.
According to Mark Gurman in his weekly Powered On newsletter, he expects the iPad app to launch as soon as this year since it’s actively been in the testing phase by Meta employees. However, there’s no word on when Meta will offer an iPad app for Threads since it initially launched as an iOS app.
Currently, you can download the iOS version of Instagram on iPad, but since the UI was designed for the iPhone, it will appear as a smartphone-sized app in front of a black screen, so it won’t be the most optimal user experience. If you have an iPad that supports Stage Manager, you could have Instagram as a standalone window, but the UI will still act as if you’re using an iPhone. So having an iPad version of the app will allow for a reimagined UI that will take full advantage of the iPad’s larger canvas, especially to view more photos at once, or even view posts at a much larger scale. Back in the early days, Apple marked how iPad apps are optimized for the larger screen, instead of being scaled-up versions of iPhone apps.
We’ll just have to wait for up to six months to see when Meta will release Instagram for iPad.
