Instagram for Android

Instagram, the hugely popular photo processing and sharing app for iOS devices, released its Android version on April 3, 2012. Instagram, which launched on October 6, 2010 in Apple’s App store, had 30 million accounts by April 2012 and a passionate community among iPhone users. With the Android version, the Instagram team is hoping to recreate this success for the much larger and growing market of Android devices. As of now, Android users seem to be all over this new app, with more than 5 million downloads in just one week after release.

For the rare uninitiated, the Instagram app allows you to take photographs with your mobile device, apply pre-set filters and share the photograph on various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr etc. The charm of the app lies in the artistic feel its filters can give to the most mundane photograph and its social network. On first look, Instagram for Android fulfills its promise to recreate the same user experience on Android.

The user interface is clean and simple to use. The photo can be taken using the mobile’s camera application or from within Instagram. After taking the picture, crop it to the mandatory square. There are 17 filters available for Android, a couple of filters less than the free iPhone version. Choose and apply your filter, add a border or rotate your image. The last step is to add a caption, choose whether to geotag your photo and select the social networks on which you want to share the photo. The photo is also uploaded to your Instagram timeline. The “Popular” icon at the bottom of the app opens up a grid of the most liked photos on Instagram at the moment and the “Profile” icon will bring up your Instagram feed.

The feature users will miss most on Instagram for Android are the tilt shift and circle blur options. Flickr and Posterous are missing from the social options. Overall, however, Instagram for Android does a good job of bringing the “exact same filters and community” to Android. The filters give that quirky vintage feel to the photos and the app’s biggest draw is the 30 million strong community that comments on and likes the photographs.

A major challenge to Instagram in the Android market would be scaling up to the wide range of Android devices with varying device and camera specifications. Instagram for Android is optimized for Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but will run on Android 2.2 and higher. Within a couple of days of its release, there were reports of slowness, crashing and incompatibility on various devices, notably HTC One X and HTC Sensation 4G. Instagram has been responding quickly with upgrades and bug fixes.