Report: A native Instagram app may soon be available on iPad

You might remember last April when word first got out that Meta was finally thinking about making an Instagram app for the iPad. After all this time, it seemed too good to be true, but now there's more fuel for that fire. According to a recent newsletter from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, employees at Meta are reportedly "actively testing" it, and development is "full steam ahead." Gurman even expects it could be released sometime this year, assuming everything goes smoothly.

For some users, it is absolutely wild that we are even having this conversation. Instagram is 14 years old, about to turn 15 this October, and the iPad celebrated its 15th birthday back in April, yet for most of the time they coexisted, using Instagram on an iPad has been a crappy, blown-up iPhone app experience (unless you use the web version).

Meta, the company behind Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, has had a weirdly avoidant relationship with the iPad historically. As Gurman notes, Mark Zuckerberg initially dismissed the iPad, calling it just a "computer" and suggesting users could simply use Facebook on the web.

He eventually caved, and a Facebook app for iPad did arrive in 2011, but Instagram remained stubbornly phone-centric. The official line often involved concerns about how square images or lower-resolution photos might look on a larger display, alongside Adam Mosseri, Instagram's head, repeatedly stating that an iPad app just was not a priority due to staffing or the size of the iPad user base.

The push for an iPad app now makes a lot more sense, especially given that the company's other product, WhatsApp, recently got its own native iPad app in May. Gurman claims that the underlying technology has "now caught up," suggesting those earlier concerns about image quality on a larger screen are less of an issue.