The competition between iPhone and Android phones has been going on for many years. We often see that this competition is also reflected in the use of mobile applications. Instagram, one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, is one of these applications.
If you use Instagram, you must have seen that photos uploaded from Android phones can be of poorer quality than those uploaded from iPhones. This situation, which is one of the reasons why the majority of influencers use iPhones, is usually associated with camera quality, but also for other reasons.
The difference in quality was most noticeable in the stories.
Instagram was an application that debuted exclusively for iOS on October 6, 2010. Two years later, it was brought to Android and managed to get over a million downloads in just one day. At that time, although there were constant updates, Android users could not benefit from all the features available to iOS owners. This caused people to think that Instagram was worse on Android.
However, the events did not cause users to give up using the application. In August 2016, Instagram breathed new life into the app by introducing the “Stories” feature, which disappears in 24 seconds, similar to what we see on Snapchat. This feature, which has become popular in a short time, has made it more obvious that there are obvious differences between photos or videos uploaded from Android and iPhone. As a matter of fact, this difference has managed to get on the nerves of Android users.
Instagram cannot make its app suitable for each and every one of the huge number of Android phones. On the iPhone, there is no such problem as there is only one phone and camera application.
Usually encountered in stories; However, the first reason for this situation, which we can often see when we use the camera in the application for anything, is the quality difference in the cameras of the devices, as you all already know. Android phones, which do not have very good camera features, can normally allow us to see worse quality photos and videos on the platform than iPhones.
However, there is another more important reason behind their poor quality. This is because there are so many Android phones in the market. As you know, dozens of phones with Android operating systems are released every year. All of these phones have different screen sizes and hardware features. That means app developers optimize the app for each device. In iOS, on the other hand, there is only one device that can be optimized.
In other words, the reason for this is that Instagram does not make its application suitable for every phone due to the fact that there are too many Android phones. On top of that, optimizing it for Android-based interfaces is another problem. That’s hundreds of camera apps for various Android phones. But iPhones only have one camera app. The number of iPhones that have already received updates is also quite low.
How does Instagram take photos or videos on Android phones?
When you want to take a photo or video through the application on your Android phone, Instagram takes a screenshot or screen recording of whatever is on your phone screen to solve it. In other words, it does not directly use the phone’s native camera software. The app also fails to take advantage of features like ultra-wide, micro, telephoto cameras and HDR.
As a result, the images you take through the application may look lower quality compared to iPhones. The difference in quality can be seen not only on Instagram, but also on Snapchat, WhatsApp etc. It is possible to see it occurring on other social media platforms as well.
Of course, there were also moves from companies for these annoying situations. Google announced last year that third-party apps can now start using the camera hardware. This showed that all cameras and functions will be used in applications. HDR support was also released with Android 13. These developments showed that the quality difference that annoyed Android owners would gradually disappear.