Introduction and Review

Want to share your life updates or interesting happenings with people around the world? Have you ever longed for being able to socialize with interesting strangers and stay in touch with friends and family through just one app? All of which you’ll be able to find on Instagram. Instagram, provided by Instagram and launched on April 3, 2012, is an online photo and video sharing community application that allows users to follow the latest situation of people they are interested in, while enabling users to upload photos and videos they want to share to the platform to interact with people around the world. With more than 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram, the second largest traditional social network after Facebook, is undoubtedly a social media platform with unlimited potential. In such a unique online community, not only are you completely allowed to share photos and videos and follow users or celebrities you’re interested in to build new friendships, but you can also engage in direct, private messaging with your friends to stay in touch with them or to bond with them. As you can see, although its core concept revolves around photo and video sharing, with the progress of society and the development of the public’s need for spiritual life, Instagram has also caught up with the pace of the times and integrated many social elements, making it one of the most influential social applications today.

With a name inspired by the words instant and telegraph, Instagram positioned itself from the start in the category of serving the public that would make sharing photos between people as easy and fast as sending telegraph messages over wires. First of all, as a classic photo and video sharing app, its convenient and diversified photo editing, uploading and sharing features undoubtedly make it stand out from other similar apps. A wide range of filters and professional photo editing functions are clearly shown when users upload and share photos on Instagram, such as increasing contrast and saturation, adjusting the tilt and blurring of photos, as well as increasing or decreasing the color temperature depending on the style.

What’s more, the Stories and Reels features, which are extremely in line with the fast-paced lifestyle of current users, have been favored and supported by a large number of users since the launch. Photos and videos added to Stories automatically disappear 24 hours after they are successfully uploaded. During these 24 hours, anyone will be able to get a taste of your creative photos and videos, as the Stories feature allows you to enrich your footage with a variety of music, stickers and even GIFs to fully express your personality and ideas. The Reels feature also offers users a new way to discover and explore other interesting users around the world. In the Reels section, Instagram allows users to browse a bottomless stream of creative short videos created by other users and even celebrities. In the same way, Instagram allows all users to express and implement their creative ideas in short videos through a number of special effects, stickers, filters and even GIFs.

Updates

In its latest update of version 264.0 on December 19, 2022, developers fixed some bugs and tried to enhance the app’s performance. According to the update history, the app has been updated basically 5 to 6 times to solve actual problems and adopt suggestions from users’ feedback as well as to optimize more new features and eliminate newly appeared bugs.

Features

1. Instagram provides users with a large number of real-time updates of filters, background music, stickers and special effects and so on, to ensure that users can fully express their creative ideas on the platform.

2. Not only does Instagram feature Reels that allow users to binge-browsing short trend-setting videos, but it also offers IGTV that enables users to watch informative longer videos created by interested vloggers.

3. Users can also exchange messages and even video chats with friends and family directly through Instagram, making it easy for users to share anything interesting in the online community directly with their friends.