OPINION: This week was an enormous week for iPad house owners. No, Apple didn’t announce any new {hardware}, nor did it launch a giant software program replace. It’s arguably larger than that; Meta has lastly launched a full-fat WhatsApp app optimised for the iPad.
Okay, so it’s clearly not fairly that thrilling, however it’s nonetheless a fairly large deal for the thousands and thousands of WhatsApp customers who additionally personal an iPad – partly resulting from simply how lengthy they’ve been ready for it.
Followers have been asking for an iPad app for years, to the purpose the place the top of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart, addressed it in a 2022 interview with The Verge, claiming that “folks have wished an iPad app for a very long time” and that they might “like to do it”.
Nicely, three years of improvement later, and it seems to be like they’ve executed it. The absolutely optimised WhatsApp for iPad app rolled out on the App Retailer earlier this week, permitting you to hyperlink the companion app to your telephone to answer to messages, take video calls and just about the rest you are able to do on WhatsApp in your smartphone.
The query, then, is when will the Meta-owned Instagram app obtain the identical remedy? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of iPad customers on the market…
Why isn’t there an Instagram app for iPad?
Whenever you truly give it some thought, the truth that there isn’t a devoted Instagram app for iPad is bizarre. It’s some of the widespread social networks round, with over two billion month-to-month customers. The app is available on smartphones of all sizes and shapes and is even accessible through the online, albeit in a simplified format.
However, in case you open the app on an iPad, you’ll basically get a blown-up model of the iPhone app – it’s not even full-screen.
And it’s not as if the corporate that owns Instagram, Meta, is brief on money and unable to afford a devoted improvement group for an Instagram app for iPad. The corporate reported $42.32 billion in income for the primary quarter of 2025, in any case.
What’s even stranger is that the Instagram app is already optimised for big-screen tablets – Android tablets, that’s.
Open Instagram on a OnePlus Pad 2 or Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Extremely, and also you’ll see what I imply. You get a devoted pill interface together with your Dwelling feed, Search, Notifications, and different icons all out there on the left-hand aspect of the app, nearer to the place your fingers are when holding a pill in a horizontal side ratio.
It additionally tweaks the side ratio of the content material displayed, each within the feed and in tales, to suit on the pill display screen with out cropping.
Primarily, it’s the Instagram app that iPad house owners need, and have been asking for because the first iPad was launched again in 2010. So, why isn’t it out there?
Nicely, it may lastly be within the works
It seems that Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has addressed the dearth of an iPad on a number of events.
Again in 2022, Mosseri replied to a tweet from YouTuber Marques Brownlee (aka MKBHD) in regards to the lack of an Instagram app for iPad. “We get this one lots,” Mosseri defined. “It’s nonetheless simply not a large enough group of individuals to be a precedence. Hoping to get to it in some unspecified time in the future, however proper now we’re very heads down on different issues.”
He stated one thing related in 2023, explaining that “it’s a great factor to do in some unspecified time in the future. However we now have solely so many individuals working at Instagram,” and, because of this, “it’s not fairly making the minimize.”
Nevertheless, two years later, it looks as if the tide would possibly lastly be turning for the fabled Instagram for iPad app – not least as a result of the long-awaited WhatsApp app has lastly made its iPad debut.
The hearsay comes from The Info, claiming that Meta is lastly head-down on creating a devoted iPad app.
Why? In response to the publication, it largely comes all the way down to the unsure authorized standing of TikTok amid the divest-or-ban legislation that noticed the app quickly blocked within the US earlier this 12 months, earlier than Trump threw the social community a lifeline.
Instagram desires to be able to vacuum up all these customers if TikTok does go darkish completely within the US, and whereas TikTok has a full-fat iPad app, that’s a large omission from Instagram’s present providing.
So, it feels like we’ll be seeing a correct Instagram for iPad app someday sooner or later – however given it took three years of improvement to get the WhatsApp app prepared, I’m not holding my breath for a 2025 launch right here.
