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The Instagram community is bigger and more diverse than ever before. 800m people now visit every month, 80% of whom are outside of the United States. As the community grows, it becomes more and more important that our app can withstand diverse network conditions, a growing variety of devices, and non-traditional usage patterns. The client […]
While working on a feature for downloading images in my app, I ran into a strange issue where progress notifications were never reaching 100%. Knowing that the framework is usually not wrong, I started suspecting my own skills (as usual). To make matters worse, nobody was able to reproduce the issue in a sample project I shared with other […]
While going through the codebase of a former client, I found that I was using four different ways for showing HTML on Android. This made me realize that I didn’t really know what the correct way of showing them is and I’ve always hammered my way using trial & error until the HTML tags have showed up. Embarrassed, I decided to explore how […]
I’ve been working on implementing bundled notifications in my app, which is by far one of my favourite features about Android 7.0 Nougat. While the official guide is good enough for understanding how they work, I’ve constantly found myself running into behaviours that were not easy to find in the documentation. This post is an attempt to summarise […]
Android is a huge ecosystem, with more than 1 billion active users spanning thousands of different device models. People who use Android have an incredible amount of choice, with significant variations in speed, feature set, and cost. Screen size is the most obvious variable — popular Android devices span from 240 x 320 to 1080 […]
There are two ways of “linkifying” URLs in a TextView. First, as an XML attribute: <TextView … android:autoLink=”phone|web” /> and second, programmatically: TextView textView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text1); Linkify.addLinks(textView, Linkify.PHONE_NUMBERS | LINKIFY.WEB_URLS); In both the cases, the framework internally registers a LinkMovementMethod on the TextView that handles dispatching a ACTION_VIEW Intent when any link is clicked. This is why phone-numbers open in a dialer when clicked, […]
Caching various files on disk has always been an integral part of many mobile apps. At Instagram, we use caching to store and recover images, videos, and text files. As a media-heavy application, the Instagram Android app requires a lightweight but stable disk cache system. When we first built the app, we started with the […]
At Instagram, our mission is to help people capture and share the world’s moments. We care deeply about the moments that people share on our platform, so enhancing how people view these moments is really important. Instagram recently launched a new design for Explore that includes “video channels”, which play in a new, full-screen, immersive […]
10 min read · Jun 21, 2016 The first version of Instagram for Android was built in four months by a team of two engineers. It’s been four years since that launch, and in that time we’ve added features such as video, direct messaging, photo maps, advertiser support, and new ways to discover and explore […]
Last weekend, thousands of Instagrammers from all over the world got together forWorldwide InstaMeet 11, one of Instagram’s community-organized, real-world meetups.#WWIM11 was our largest and most geographically diverse InstaMeet ever — thousands of Instagrammers from Muscat to Bushwick shared over 100k photos. With over 300 million people around the world using Instagram every month, 65% […]