Hipsters rejoice! The hugely popular photo tweaking and sharing app Instagram has finally landed in the Google Play store, ready to be downloaded to Android smartphones everywhere.
The app has been a long time coming, initially launching on Apple’s App Store and gaining a huge following from the iPhone faithful. It’s developer promised an Android version would be coming not so long ago, explaining that the Android version would differ from the iOS version, even offering more features. A pre-registration page was put up just a few weeks ago, and since then we’re told that over 430,000 Android users have registered interest.
Available now from the Google Play Store completely free of charge, Instagram for Android brings the popular mix of simple photo editing and social sharing to Android phones running version 2.2 and supporting the OpenGL ES 2 standard.
If you’ve never used Instagram before, it’s a social photography app with a twist. You can ‘follow’ friends, family and even famous people to see their uploads, while snapping away and uploading your own shots. Pictures can be tweaked by adding filters, borders and various other effects, and shared to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and FourSquare, with Flickr support coming soon.
We’ve had a quick play with Instagram on our Galaxy Nexus and can safely say the app works nicely, albeit with a few features missing when compared to the iOS version: namely Tilt Shift and Live Filtering. We’re sure these features will be added in a future update though.
Overall the app has a distinctive ‘Android’ feel to it and you can easily set the app apart from the iOS version. Now all that’s left to do is to take some pictures of distinctively ‘cool’ things and add some vintage filters, then we’ll be down with the kids, right?
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