It’s finally happened: Instagram has launched a proper iPad app. Yes, you read that right. After 15 years of iPhone dominance and endless “when will it happen?” threads, the social media giant has finally bothered to give Apple’s tablet the love it deserves.
So, what’s new?
For starters, this isn’t just a stretched-out version of the iPhone app. The iPad version has been re-worked to take advantage of the bigger screen. That means:
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Reels first – open the app and boom, you’re straight into a wall of vertical videos.
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Chronological feed – you can actually scroll posts in order, like it’s 2010 again, before the algorithm told us what we wanted to see.
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Side-by-side layouts – comments now appear right next to videos, and your DMs show inbox + chat on the same screen. Basically, like Messenger on desktop.
What makes this funny is that Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head honcho, once dismissed the iPad crowd as “too small to matter”. Fast-forward a couple of years and—surprise!—the “not big enough” user base has suddenly earned a full-blown app.
Is it groundbreaking? Not really. Is it nice to finally scroll Insta without feeling like you’re holding an oversized iPhone? Absolutely.