Instagram Teases New Android App & Reaches 27 Million Registered Users
Having been exclusively an iPhone app for two years, Instagram has been one of the major success stories for app developers, having become one of the most popular apps on iOS. It was revealed earlier this month that the company had 25 million registered users worldwide, an impressive figure when you consider it’s only available on one format.
But now, co-founder Kevin Systrom has revealed that this number is now roughly 27 million registered users and is set to increase rapidly with the planned release of their Android app.
Revealed at the SXSW conference in Texas, Systrom showed off the company’s upcoming Android app. While not giving the app a full demo (the app is still very much in beta mode), he did tease Techcrunch by saying that “in some ways, it’s better than our iOS app. It’s crazy”.
Out of the 27 million registered users, Systrom didn’t disclose figures regarding the number of active users, but said that of all the users who have been active in the last week, 67 per cent of them used the app yesterday. Of course, the number of active users for an app can be completely different to the number of registered users, but you could assume that its active figure is roughly half of its registered users, which is still impressive.
This shouldn’t come as any surprise considering the popularity of the app, branching out onto Android platforms was always on the cards and will significantly boost the app’s number of registered users. The other question, which wasn’t brought up during the conference, is the idea of Instagram generating revenue.
So far, they’ve been pretty smart not placing adverts in their product, but considering the company’s growth and the cost of maintaining and improving the service, it’s almost inevitable that some kind of revenue strategy will come into place soon.
Whether it’ll be ads superimposed or maybe adapting a freemium strategy (payment for additional filters etc), Instagram know that they need to develop a business model at some point, and users may as well brace themselves for this to appear in some form sooner rather than later.
