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Instagram for Android now available

Kathryn McConnachie
By Kathryn McConnachie, Digital Media Editor at ITWeb.
Johannesburg, 04 Apr 2012

After a long wait, Instagram for Android has arrived. The app is now available for free download from Google Play.

The mobile photo-sharing application allows users to capture images, add filters and share across social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram gained notoriety as an exclusively iOS app, and its developers attributed much of its success to the popularity of the iPhone 4S and its 8MP camera, and Apple's app of the year award which it received in 2011.

Since becoming available yesterday, the Instagram for Android app already had almost 38 500 downloads at the time of writing.

In a statement announcing the new app, Instagram says: “We've been working tirelessly to make this new Android app a first-class mobile photo-sharing experience. We've been meticulous about translating the Instagram experience to the Android platform.

“The Android app offers an extremely familiar Instagram experience when compared to the iOS app. You'll find all the same exact filters and community as our iOS version.”

While the app maintains the same interface and basic features, it has been noted that the Android version lacks some of the iOS version's editing options, such as tilt shift. Instagram says such features will be added to later versions. The new app does, however, feature an “Advanced Camera” option that automatically resizes images, which the iOS version does not have.

According to Instagram, the release of the Android app is a big step for the Instagram community as a whole. Leading up to the Android release of the app, Instagram opened a sign-up page for Android users online. According to statistics from Instagram, it had over 430 000 people on its Android waiting list.

The app currently has 30 million registered users, over a billion photos uploaded with an average of five million uploads a day. Instagram also says its photo sharing network generates 575 likes, and 81 comments, per second.

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