They’ve tested it time and time again, most recently last year. There’s less posting of images and stories which they figured would lower engagement across the app in general if there was marginally less content (they see it as their high growth crown jewel). I suspect when growth plateaus we’ll see the iPad app

But that's a lame argument: I don't expect iPad to be the primary device for posting, but you should be able to have a fine consuming experience in it.

It feels like running a 640x480 app on a 4k capable screen.

It's a joke that they would ignore what a crappy experience it is.

If you're not interested in posting why not just use instagram.com?

It feels like running a 640x480 app on a 4k capable screen.

It's a joke that they would ignore what a crappy experience it is.

I believe they have focused on their web app for this. Turning it into a home screen based web application has been far better. Not as great as a native app, but better than the iPhone one scaled up!

Okay, so put a WebKit wrapper around that?

Is there some one-click way to "bottle" web apps like this on demand? I'm thinking of something that does some light crawling, fills its cache up, shims xmlhttprequests for static data, and sandwiches it in a shell. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could always fall back on the real site when its cache falls through..

You don't even need a native bottle. The site just needs to offer a PWA manifest and associated service worker functionality. https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/

Yup. Cordova / PhoneGap pretty much more-or-less does the trick for this.