Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri once again shot down the possibility of an iPad app (because who cares about the millions of iPad users out there, right?). It’s been 12 years since Instagram’s release — over a decade without an accompanying iPad app — and we’re tired.
Just think about it for a second: how absurd is it that iPad users either have to settle for an iPhone-sized Instagram app experience on their tablet or must succumb to browsing the platform on a web browser — as Marques Brownlee points out — in the year 2022?
Yup, we get this one a lot. It’s still just not a big enough group of people to be a priority. Hoping to get to it at some point, but right now we’re very heads down on other things.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) February 27, 2022
Mosseri’s most recent comment about the matter doesn’t even inspire rage anymore. He’s essentially said the same thing over and over again throughout the years, all amounting to a huge kick in the teeth to the iPad owners/Instagram users out there.
“It’s still just not a big enough group of people to be a priority,” Mosseri said on Twitter in reference to the possibility of an iPad app for Instagram. “Hoping to get to it at some point, but right now we’re very heads down on other things.”
According to market research firm IDC, Apple shipped out 17.5 million iPads across the globe in the last quarter of 2021, and its iPads made up 34 percent of the worldwide tablet market last year. Macs, on the other hand, didn’t see as many sales as iPads in the fourth quarter of 2021 — Apple shipped out 7.6 million Macs during that time, IDC notes. iPhone sales still topped both by a significant margin, with IDC recording 84.9 million iPhone shipments in the last quarter of 2021.
In 2021, Apple reported that of 1.6 billion active devices, more than 1 billion of them were iPhones. With sales that continue to outpace the rest of Apple’s hardware lineup and other smartphones, Mosseri apparently has enough reason to discount platforms with install bases measured by mere tens or hundreds of millions and ignore anyone who just wants to flip through photos on their tablet. Mosseri only proves that point further in another tweet, where he mentions Android — which currently has over 3 billion active devices — as the largest platform Instagram serves. If that’s the case, Instagram has no problem skipping over anyone on iPad.
While using Instagram on an iPad might seem odd, it’s the same idea as using the app on your computer or laptop; you’re not there to take pictures, you’re there to browse on a bigger screen so you don’t have to strain to see every single detail in someone’s picture or video. As it is, Mosseri calls an Instagram app for iPad a “finally feature,” which he categorizes alongside other dreamed-about features like dark mode, scheduled posts, and the ability to delete a single photo from a carousel — let that one sink in. Maybe in 2023, he’ll decide it’s finally time for Instagram to pull itself together and just create an iPad-optimized app.