Instagram developers started working on Burbn in March 2010. Burbn was a very fundamental app. It was used to post your plan. It was using HTML5 which at that time had latency issues. In October 2010, Instagram was released on Apple App Store. On the very first day they got twenty five thousand downloads. Users get so much engaged in the app and started sharing photos that Instagram servers started crashing due to massive amount of traffic.
When iPhone 4 was just about to arrive. Instagram was going to be more liked and used by the people. Since iPhone 4 had better camera so there would have been even more fun to apply digital filters to the photos and share them online. Besides this Apple’s iOS at that time had enough functionality to give instagram network effects. After that Instagram hit one million downloads and then ten million downloads. Everything was happening very quickly. Instagram didn’t had to pay much attention to its growth. People were liking the app, downloading it and telling friends about it.
Instagram servers started hitting so much traffic that developers had to work hard day and night to keep the server alive. Instagram developers also said that Facebook app was too complicated for users to use on a mobile device whereas Instagram provided a very simple interface to the users. To avoid making app more complex they refused to add more features to it. Last month Instagram stated that it has 27M registered users. With the launch of Instagram on Android, it got 50M registered users. It’d so rapid growth and such a high level of addiction that Facebook was forced to think about it for its future.
Finally on April 9, 2012 we heard the news that Instagram is going to be acquired by Facebook. Nice work done by Instagram developers. Making users get involved in such a short period of time was pretty hard. The key to their success lies in the simplicity and precise focus on the basic functionality and ‘real joy’ of taking photos. App is so much simple that you are able to take screenshot in no more than 3 taps. This app also reveals users eagerness to share visual content with their friends.
No doubt it was a great effort and in return a great reward. $1 Billion is not a joke, especially for a mobile app. Instagram is now ranking first in Apple app store. This story is going to inspire app developers all around the world and will surely help them build a passion to develop apps, build strategy and stay focused on the objective of an application. Better be simple rather stuffing it with lots of and lots of features.
image source-http://instagr.am/
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I heard that Facebook buy instagrams shares I hope they closed to present a big change in Facebook.
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