Everybody, this is not a drill. Meta has officially an all-new version of the Instagram app that’s finally optimized for the iPad. That’s right; this has been long overdue for several reasons. The original iPad was introduced on January 2010, followed by the official launch on April in the United States and other countries. 2010 was also the year when we saw the launch of the iPhone 4 (June), which took mobile photography to a whole new level, and later in October, Instagram was launched. However, since then, as Instagram became more popular, and more iPhone and iPad devices became mainstream, the app was long suited to run on smartphones. If users were to open up the app on the iPad, what they saw was what they got – a smartphone-sized interface. Even worse, even when users scaled up that app, it would look pixelated. To add insult to injury, other popular apps and games, such as Facebook, YouTube, NYT Games, have been optimized for the iPad. Heck, even Snapchat just updated its app to run natively on iPad recently.
Earlier this year, Meta confirmed that it was working on the iPad version, and now, that time has come. iPad owners will finally be able to get their hands on the latest app update. As mentioned before, this new update is designed and optimized to take full advantage of the iPad’s larger canvas, rather than scaling up the original UI from the iPhone app. For example, the Following tab, users will be presented with three sub-sections: All, Friends, and Latest. The DMs screen takes advantage of the larger screen by having other friends’ conversations on the left and the currently selected conversation on the right, you should see similar treatment to other screens. To go to different screens on the iPad’s optimized interface, users will navigate using the vertical row of icons on the left.
With this big update along with other major improvements coming to iPadOS 26, this is shaping up to be the most upgraded experience that iPad owners have long deserved. Users can download the free update on the App Store. Instagram is always available to download for free for new users.
