Android

Instagram Data Saver Mode

We recently shipped Data Saver Mode, a new feature on Instagram for Android that helps the app consume less mobile…

Making Direct Messages Reliable and Fast

Over the last few years, Instagram Direct has grown to be a core part of sharing content…

App modularization and module lazy loading at Instagram and beyond

Instagram prides itself on having a lean app. But as the number of engineers and features grows, so do the challenges to size. We start to face issues like:

• increase in application size…

Improving performance with background data prefetching

The Instagram community is bigger and more diverse than ever before. 800m people now visit every month, 80% of whom are outside of the United States. As the community grows, it becomes more and more important that our app can withstand…

Building a better Instagram app for Android

Android is a huge ecosystem, with more than 1 billion active users spanning thousands of different device models. People who use Android have an incredible amount of choice, with significant variations in speed, feature set, and cost. Screen size is the…

Building an Open Source, Carefree Android Disk Cache

Caching various files on disk has always been an integral part of many mobile apps. At Instagram, we use caching to store and recover images, videos, and text files. As a media-heavy application, the Instagram Android app requires a…

Beautiful, Performant Android UI

At Instagram, our mission is to help people capture and share the world’s moments. We care deeply about the moments that people share on our platform, so enhancing how people view these moments is really important. Instagram recently launched a new design for Explore that…

Instagram + Android: Four Years Later

The first version of Instagram for Android was built in four months by a team of two engineers. It’s been four years since that launch, and in that time we’ve added features such as video, direct messaging, photo maps, advertiser support, and new ways to discover…