Instagram is a visual social media platform, the iPad has best screen for photos, yet it's taken the rollercoaster situation with TikTok for the Meta-owned company to start work on an iPadOS app.
Instagram is coming to the iPad, reportedly
Maybe it's just that Instagram head Adam Mosseri finally picked up an iPad for himself and changed his mind about Apple versus Android. Or maybe his engineers have finally revolted against the tedium of supporting eleventy-billion different Android devices and no iPads.
But according to The Information, Instagram is now developing a native iPad app. And it's doing so as part of its larger efforts to compete with TikTok.
Those efforts include promoting itself to creators as being a good alternative to TikTok. In its most recent major update in February 2025, Instagram revised its own app so that it more closely resembled TikTok, too.
Then in an April 7, 2025 meeting with creators, Instagram owner Meta showed off Edits video-editing app that it added in that February update. This is a replacement for the CapCut app that's faced similar threats to TikTok of being closed down.
Edits, CapCut, TikTok, it's all very important to Meta, but the real news from that creators meeting was that Instagram is coming to the iPad. Naturally, then, Instagram is now refusing to comment.
That's at least better than before, when Meta chief Adam Mosseri shrugged about he wasn't making an iPad app. "Yup, we get this one a lot," he said in 2022. "It's still just not a big enough group of people to be a priority."
Instagram users can use the firm's iPhone app on the iPad, it just looks dreadful. Which rather goes against the entire point of Instagram being a visual social network.
Since 2023, users have also had the option of Instagram on Android tablets.
Now, only Instagram knows the true details of its userbase and what devices they are on. But the company developed an Android tablet version when Android is notoriously difficult to design for because of the myriad different screen sizes and resolutions available.
And the iPad has always outside all Android tablets combined. So if the iPad market is too small, there would have to be some weirdly disproportionate number of Android owners using Instagram to have building for that platform make sense.
Mosseri could have data saying how few iPad users are putting up with using Instagram on it compared to how many Android users were. But it's still surely the case that you'd serve the larger market first, and that is iPad.
That's the iPhone Instagram app on iPhone -- expanded to larger size. You can turn the iPad around and make the app look fuzzier, if you like
If an unnamed source at Meta's April 7 event is correct and not just suffering from wishful thinking, it's taken Instagram 15 years to get around to the iPad.
It might genuinely be the case that its engineers are bored, too. For while Instagram had a major update in February 2025, usually its engineers have to just crank out minor bug fixes over and over again.
You have to wonder how many bugs there can be, though, since the Instagram iPhone app is now on version 375. And the last 19 updates, all that the App Store shows, have been bug fixes.
So engineers might want the extra challenge of clicking a whole second box in their Xcode iOS development environment. But Instagram users definitely want a native iPad app.
That said, Instagram and Meta software engineers did have their hands full developing Threads as an alternative to Twitter. It seemed like a good idea at the time.