Facebook answer: why Instagram on Android still compresses photo quality a lot
It will soon be 9 years since the American social network Instagram exists for smartphones based on the Android operating system, but the developers have not yet solved the problem of the low quality of the published photos.
Instagram devs are aware of this issue but have not fixed anything so far.
If you look at all the popular “Instagrammers” for whom Instagram is the main blogging platform, you can see one fact that unites them all. Most bloggers use iPhone as their primary smartphone for creating and posting Instagram content. And this is by no means an indicator that they choose the iPhone because of the strength of the Apple brand, everything is much more prosaic – the iPhone does not compress the quality of photos and videos during publication.
Some bloggers even joke: “How do you know if a person has Android? You need to see his Stories on Instagram – they will be of poor quality. ” Indeed, the Android version of Instagram compresses the quality of the published content very much.
Initially, Instagram was released only for iOS devices in 2010, and only two years later it appeared on Android. Then the application was developed only by the company itself, which was independent at that time. But in 2012, Instagram was bought out by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, whose resources are practically unlimited. At that time, “Stories” did not yet exist, and no one spoke about the different quality of the published photos, because the capabilities of the cameras of smartphones of that time left much to be desired.
But as time went on, the app, led by Facebook, acquired new features, for example, the Direct messenger appeared, “Stories” were added, and the ability to publish videos appeared. During the same period, smartphone cameras developed by leaps and bounds every year, which (not without the participation of Instagram, of course) gave birth to a new art form – mobile photography.
Flagship smartphones of the same year of release produced approximately the same quality of photos and videos, at least Apple (as the only representative of iOS) and Samsung (as a bright representative of the Android camp). And with the development of cameras, users began to observe that the quality of published content from Android smartphones turned out to be lower than from iPhones.
The cause of this problem is still unclear. It could be assumed that it is hidden in the source code of Instagram. But this theory is unlikely, since “Stories” appeared much later and already under the leadership of Facebook, and it is in them that the largest drop in quality is observed.
Exactly a year ago, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced that he was aware of this problem, and it only surfaced recently. However, Mosseri was lying a little then, because this problem even at the beginning of 2020 had existed for a very long time. Alternatively, it can be assumed that all Instagram employees only use iPhones, so they did not know about the problem. Only in this case it turns out that Instagram did not pay attention to user complaints.
Popular Mechanics ran a little experiment. We shot the same photos and videos via the Instagram Stories camera on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra and on the iPhone 12 Pro and posted them. After that, we saved the published materials and checked their original data. It turned out very interesting: the weight of the photo taken on the iPhone was 569 kB, and on the Samsung – only 328 kB. We don’t even consider that the iPhone has a 12MP camera and the Samsung has a 108MP camera. That is, on Android, photos are compressed almost twice as much as on the iPhone.
The situation with the video published in “History” is a little different: the size of both 15-second videos was 2.5 MB, and the difference in quality is already invisible. However, another problem has opened up here. Both smartphones have optical image stabilization, but in the iPhone version of the application, the application also connects digital image stabilization, and in the Android version, the digital stab is not connected.
It is still unknown why this happens. It’s already been a year since Instagram announced that they were working on this problem. The editorial board of Popular Mechanics asks an open question to Facebook, why the Android version of Instagram still degrades the quality of published content, if the process of working on this problem was announced a year ago?
Of course, users can just choose an iPhone and not suffer from the problems of the Android version of Instagram, but not everyone can afford to buy a brand new iPhone. Hopefully, one day, Instagram will listen to its users’ feedback and provide a high level of service for all users.