Instagram for Android gets 5 million downloads in one week

Guess what: Android users really, really like Instagram. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that lots and lots of people like Instagram, and a lot of them use Android phones and tablets. At least 5 million, to be precise – today the download ticker in the Google Play Store was upgraded to “5-10 million”, meaning that at this precise moment it’s probably at around 5.1 million total downloads.  For an app that came out exactly one week ago, that’s an astounding number… though we’ve got to point out that they’d be doing a lot better if they hadn’t waited a year and a half before releasing a proper Android port.

Not that Instagram needs any instruction from whiny tech bloggers like me. The company was bought by Facebook just yesterday for an astounding one billion dollars. For a mobile app developer with six employees, that’s basically the equivalent of being sent to Valhalla without having to die first. Odds are that the Android app was just the icing on the cake – Instagram claimed more than 10 million total users on iOS before last week, so now they’re at somewhere between 15 and 20 million.

If you haven’t downloaded Instagram yet (hey, not everyone is a fan), you can check out our official review. Long story short: it’s a solid enough app, but needs some serious polish and there are still too many devices that aren’t supported. It’s a good thing that the developers have been releasing regular updates – the third post-release update was sent out on Friday. One has to wonder what all those whiny iPhone users are thinking, now that their little “artistic” community has been bought by the web’s version of McDonald’s and between a quarter and a third of Instagram users are accessing the service on Android.

[via USA Today]