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Apple debuted the iconic and now wildly popular iPad in 2010. A few months later, Instagram landed on the App Store to rapid success. But for 15 years, Instagram hasn’t bothered to optimize its app layout for the iPad’s larger screen.
That’s finally changing today: There’s now a dedicated Instagram iPad app available globally on the App Store.
It has been a long time coming. Even before Apple began splitting its mobile operating system from iOS into iOS and iPadOS, countless apps adopted a fresh user interface that embraced the larger screen size of the tablet. This was the iPad’s calling card at the time, and those native apps optimized for its precise screen size are what made Apple’s device stand out from a sea of Android tablets that largely ran phone apps inelegantly blown up to fit the bigger screen.
Except Instagram never went iPad-native. Open the existing app right now, and you’ll see the same phone app stretched to the iPad’s screen size, with awkward gaps on the sides. And you’ll run into the occasional problems when you post photos from the iPad, like low-resolution images. Weirdly, Instagram did introduce layout improvements for folding phones a few years ago, which means the experience is better optimized on Android tablets today than it is on iPad.
Instagram’s chief, Adam Mosseri, has long offered excuses, often citing a lack of resources despite being a part of Meta, a multibillion-dollar company. Instagram wasn’t the only offender—Meta promised a WhatsApp iPad app in 2023 and only delivered it earlier this year. (WhatsApp made its debut on phones in 2009.)
The fresh iPad app (which runs on iPadOS 15.1 or later) offers more than just a facelift. Yes, the Instagram app now takes up the entire screen, but the company says users will drop straight into Reels, the short-form video platform it introduced five years ago to compete with TikTok. The Stories module remains at the top, and you’ll be able to hop into different tabs via the menu icons on the left. There’s a new Following tab (the people icon right below the home icon), and this is a dedicated section to see the latest posts from people you actually follow.
