Instagram is among one of the most popular and used social media platforms. It was initially an entertainment platform for users to share their everyday pictures and videos with friends, family and the world. It was created back in 2010 but rose to fame quite quickly. Later on, original creators sold the app to Facebook Inc. for $1.0 billion.
Several other entrepreneurs got their inspiration from Instagram and created somewhat similar apps (picture and video sharing) with various other features, and what is more fun is the fact that they also got popular very quickly. Some big names are Snapchat and Vine.
This article is going to talk about Instagram’s mobile app evolution over the past decade, and how you can create your own similar application.
Evolution of Instagram’s mobile application
According to the stats, the estimated number pictures that are daily being posted on Instagram is 95 million. That’s a huge number. Back in 2018, the number of daily active users on Instagram reached up to 1 billion. With such great achievements in a minimal time is the evidence of this applications massive success. In the initial times, it was just regarded as an entertainment app, used for photo and video editing.
Let’s see the two major phases through which Instagram went, features wise.
- Instagram for entertainment
With a number of colorful filters and elements like crop or adjusting brightness, Instagram was a great picture and video editing tool.
- Instagram for E-commerce
With the increase in online business and technologies talking over the business world, Instagram has also turned itself into an e-commerce platform. Brands use this platform for massive user engagement and showcase their products. Instagram now also provides an option of turning your personal account into a business account.
- Instagram for messages
The ‘DM’ or direct message option on Instagram is a quick way to interact your followers/customers. The more recent updates of Instagram have added multiple fun options to the DM like changing the color of chat box, highlight messages or reply to specific messages. One prominent feature of Instagram DM is that it allows you to remove a sent message, but it notifies the other person that someone has unsent the message.
Instagram is ever evolving. It keeps on bringing in new updates for its users. A few years ago, users were only capable of uploading videos that were seconds long. But the newer updates on Instagram has allowed a video as long as 1 minute and now even longer videos can be uploaded through IGTV.
Create your own mobile application like Instagram
Let’s talk about the things that you must consider before you dive head into the app development process.
- Specify your target audience by conducting a market research.
- Do your research on your competitors. keep an eye on what new things are going on the competitor photo-sharing apps and what is public’s demand and reaction.
- Finalize your app concept, strategy, goals, timeline, technologies that you want to incorporate in your app and budget.
- Start looking for a reliable and well reputed software house. The mobile app development in Houston is top-notch and you can also hire a company from there.
- Prepare your PR strategy and how you aim to market your application. Decide which platforms will be suitable for your marketing.
- Keep up with the competition by adding new functionality, design aspects, and reaching out to new user groups to the project.
Technologies to consider while build the app
Since Instagram is all about visual aesthetics (and now e-commerce) you can use the similar tech stack that is used by Instagram. We are going to name some of them down for your ease.
- React
- React Native
- Python
- JavaScript
- Java
- Nginx
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Django
- js
Although there are many more technologies that work together to make Instagram work flawlessly, we have mentioned some of them to give you an idea.
Endnote
Overall, creating a photo-sharing software like Instagram is all about processing, transferring, and storing images. Keep in mind that creating standards for the photographs that people want to contribute is necessary to guarantee that the profile gallery and feed look good.
