Instagram's groundbreaking approach to iPad app design
Description
This image is a screenshot of a tweet from user Singto Conley, which sarcastically comments on the quality of apps made by Instagram. The tweet's text reads, 'oh yeah i almost forgot this app is made by the geniuses at instagram'. Below the text is a photo showing two iPads side-by-side. Both devices are displaying social media apps - the new Threads app on the left and Instagram on the right - in a small, phone-sized window centered on the large tablet screen. The rest of the screen is filled with black, unused space. The meme is a sharp critique of Meta's (Instagram's parent company) failure to create native, optimized applications for the iPad. Instead of utilizing the larger screen real estate, the apps simply run the phone version in a letterboxed mode, a practice widely seen as lazy development and a poor user experience. For developers, it highlights the disconnect between a trillion-dollar company's resources and its seemingly low effort in supporting major platforms beyond the smartphone
Comments
39Comment deleted
That's not a poorly designed app, it's just aggressively containerized
Instagram’s iPad app proves you can pour billions into ML ranking, yet still ship a single storyboard hard-coded to 375×812
Ah yes, the classic 'eventual consistency' where 'eventual' means somewhere between now and the heat death of the universe, and 'consistency' is more of a suggestion than a requirement - perfect for a social network where your follower count exists in a quantum superposition until observed
Ah yes, the classic 'view-in-a-view-in-a-view' bug - when your component tree becomes a fractal and your render cycle achieves enlightenment through infinite recursion. Nothing says 'we thoroughly tested on tablets' quite like accidentally implementing the Droste effect in your mobile UI. At least they're consistent: Instagram's algorithm shows you the same content repeatedly, so why shouldn't the UI follow suit?
Threads: Instagram's proof that engineering orgs exhibit distributed system entropy - eventual consistency in UI mediocrity
Instagram’s iPad support is basically fixedWidth(375pt) + alignCenter - a scalability pattern where the bezel handles horizontal sharding
Apparently the iPad build is a 375pt root view centered on black - size classes replaced with a single OKR
Explain pls Comment deleted
Threads app doesn't adapt to screen size? Comment deleted
Same as Instagram, yes Comment deleted
Only iPhone version, not iPad Comment deleted
How do you even do that? Entire mobile programming resolves around apps adapting to different screens Comment deleted
not on iOS, apparently Comment deleted
Android yes. Apple iirc requires you to support those specific screens (resolutions) that they put in their devices individually Comment deleted
What if you use things like react-native or flutter? Do you still need to support individual resolutions? Comment deleted
No idea, sorry Comment deleted
someone has (fortunately) never used an iPad Comment deleted
Everyone and their dog were telling me that iPad is better then android tablets Comment deleted
They all have their own special set of unfortunate design decisions. At least Moore's law mostly compensated for the shittiness of Java. Comment deleted
I wouldn't say Moore's Law. At least on Android there was a lot of work put into making apps use as many threads as possible. You have coroutines that create 3 pools of threads: 1. (1 thread) for UI 2. (4 threads) background computation 3. (64 threads) API calls Then it was combined with CPU hybrid architectures where you have big cores, medium cores and small cores. Best phones seem to have about 1 big core, about 3 medium cores and about 4 small cores. So together it makes for a fairly well designed system. Recently Google has created Compose for UI, which can draw stuff in parallel, allowing for even higher efficiency. Comment deleted
I was talking mainly about memory. About the design: all that to make it about as responsive as SHR (plain Linux + X11 + Enlightenment touch mode) was on my elderly G1/htcdream. Good job developers. 💪 Comment deleted
I think that developing apps on modern android is far easier than whatever you had on that G1 😅 Comment deleted
Debatable, I did say plain old Linux with X11. Though EFL definitiely does not win any awards for ease of use. It was at time when QtQuick was basically a tech demo without widget support. The actual pain point was drivers, or lack thereof for running regular Linux systems. Otherwise I'd stick with it. (Maemo and Sailfish are nice too) Comment deleted
You can have apps that adapt poorly but this is something on a completely different level Comment deleted
This website is best viewed at 800x600 resolution. Comment deleted
Looks as great as the youtube app on Android tablets Comment deleted
What device is that? iPad? What is the arrows icon at the bottom? Comment deleted
It's like 2x scale button, so entire UI of the app is blurred. Comment deleted
It's funny coz it's still like I remember things on iPads back in 2013. Comment deleted
Facebook does not support tablets screen size on purpose Comment deleted
What is the purpose of that? Comment deleted
And the whole tablet thing is seems sad to me, as a Win8/WP8/UWP developer (kinda), this idea of universal platform and unified UI was so good. But it went to shut down. And now no windows phones, no UWP. Back in times there were lack of apps in Windows Store because the platform was unpopular because there were lack of apps. But crappy useless things like the iPad is selling year by year, grown it's popularity. Comment deleted
I went with an Android tablet and with android 12L I started wondering what more would you want Comment deleted
On Apple they might have been betting on Moore's Law as they seem to have really strong single core, while not necessarily so strong multicore Comment deleted
It's like viewing a 4:3 content letterboxed to 16:9 stream broadcast via PAL/SECAM and then letterboxed again on a classic 4:3 CRT TV, thus filling only a small portion of screen area while being a perfect match w.r.t. aspect ratio. 🤦♂ Comment deleted
What a nostalgic ratio. Comment deleted
When you prioritise DSA over common sense Comment deleted
iOS dev here to explain This behavior of the app is just a check box "supports iPad" in the XCode. Developers may disable it for one of two reasons. Apple requires landscape mode support on iPhone, if you support iPad (genius). Developing landscape on iPhone is a fucking hell (status bar, top bar, bottom bar, good luck fitting anything else). If you disable iPad support - you can lock app in portrait. Another, very common reason of some clients, iPad support requires you to upload two another set of screenshots to AppStore, and client doesn't want to pay designer for it. Comment deleted
Thanks for the information sir Comment deleted