The photo world has been up in arms since Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced what even casual Instagram users already knew (see sidebar): Instagram is no longer a photo sharing app – it’s in essence an entertainment and branding platform, focusing on Creators (“to help them make a living”), video, shopping and messaging.

And with that positioning, he announced that the company will experiment with new features, such as providing users with more recommendations (“to show you things in your feed you might not be following yet” – read: more brand-sponsored content) and giving them a more immersive (full-screen and mobile-first) video experience in Instagram's quest to catch up with TikTok and YouTube.

Interesting sidenote: his message was delivered as a video, on Twitter, that is. After the excrements hit the fan, he tweeted a subsequent message stating that he’d really meant to say, “Instagram is not *just* a photo sharing app.” But the original message was already sticking.

The synopsis of Instagram’s milestones shows that moving beyond photo sharing has been going on for a long time. The company has launched various attempts to embrace video since 2013.

Instagram has been morphing and morphing and morphing during its entire existence in various attempts to catch up with their competitors: from a tool to a network to an entertainment platform; from algorithmic feed to Stories, from photos to videos.

This FOMO-driven strategy has led to a bulbous entity of which it’s increasingly hard to define what it is all about – other than making as much money as possible and keeping up with the competition. Features are not being added because they organically fit with Instagram’s strategy, these appear to be thrown in each time they fear that their users will leave them for whatever competitor is trending. How long can that go well?

If you are an innovative photo or video app developer, how do you partner with Instagram? In short: you can’t, other than using Instagram’s limited (and last year even more restricted) APIs. As someone who has worked on both sides of the aisle (as a Photoshop and later Quark plug-in developer; ending up working for Quark itself, whose developer network made it a dominant driver of the desktop publishing revolution), I think Instagram’s “do it ourselves” mindset causes its greatest missed opportunity.

Why only think of Creators and brand advertisers as potential partners? Why not tap into all the innovation coming from hundreds, if not thousands, of photo, video, AR or other app developers and truly become a defendable platform that does not have to crank out new features each time the moment a competitor adds them? That's what agile developer partners are for.

Oct. 2010: launched as a square photo filter app, mimicking Hipstamatic with pastel (and other quality-forgiving) filters. 

April 2012: acquired by Facebook for $1B.

June 2013: enabling sharing of up to 15-second videos, along the lines of Vine.

December 2013: Instagram Direct: private messaging, along the lines of WhatsApp.

August 2015: removed square photo requirement, mimicking everybody else.

August 2016: 24-hour Stories – mimicking Snapchat.

November 2016: adding live video to Stories, along the lines of Meerkat.

April 2017: adding AR stickers to Stories, along the lines of Snapchat.

March 2016: extended videos up to 60 seconds, along the lines of YouTube.

June 2016: ended “feed” API access.

August 2018: IGTV, vertical video of up to 10 minutes, along the lines of YouTube but vertical only.

March 2020: introduced co-watching, allowing users to share posts with each other over video calls, along the lines of Squad.

June 2020: discontinued remaining Instagram Legacy API in lieu of Instagram Basic Display API and Instagram Graph API.

August 2020: Reels, music video sharing along the lines of TikTok.

February 2021: introduced vertical feed for Stories, along the lines of TikTok.