Why Instagram Is Becoming Facebook’s Next Facebook - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/technology/why-instagram-is-becoming-facebooks-next-facebook.html
Instagram has thus triggered an echo — it feels like Facebook. More precisely, it feels the way Facebook did from 2009 to 2012, when it silently crossed over from one of those tech things that some people sometimes did to one of those tech things that everyone you know does every day.
But last year, you might have said there was a question whether a picture-based service like Instagram could have reached similar scale — whether it was universal enough, whether there were enough people whose phones could handle it, whether it could survive greater competition from newer photo networks like Snapchat. Maybe those problems or others will rear up in the future, and growth could yet stall. But for now, Instagram seems to have overcome any perceived hurdles. It seems to have reached escape velocity.
Other bottlenecks involved technical fixes. More than 80 percent of Instagram’s users are now outside the United States, and the service is growing especially quickly in parts of Asia and South America that are dogged by underpowered Android phones and slow cellular networks. (Snapchat, for example, has had trouble with Android performance.) A huge part of Instagram’s engineering efforts are thus devoted to making its Android app work better outside the United States. For instance, after Instagram began Stories — the video-slide show feature it took from Snapchat — it spent a month adding speed improvements for international markets.