Instagram for Android is garbage and no one is doing anything to fix it: everything works wrong

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a few days with the iPhone 17 to review it. These were the best days I’ve had on Instagram in years. In the iOS app, everything works as it should, interruptions are rare, everything is in place and the quality of the content is perfect. On Android it’s the other way around. In fact, and I am not exaggerating at all: a mobile application in the Google ecosystem is garbage. And the worst thing is that this is not what happened in recent weeks: it has been like this for a long time.

Historically, the Instagram Android app has always ranked below the iOS version in the Meta priority rankings. A good example is content quality: History downloaded from iPhone always looks better than from Android. This also happens if the image is downloaded from a gallery, although to a lesser extent.

The problem is that the difference between the versions goes much further, even to the point of conversion Instagram for Android as a battlefield where everything is in chaos, almost nothing works as it should and errors number in the dozens. The situation is so serious and has reached such a point that the disastrous quality of the content has already faded into the background.

The problem goes beyond making the version better for content creators who end up buying an iPhone: Most regular users find the Android app somewhat tedious and time-consuming to use. This is not only wrong, but also no one seems to want to fix it.

The Instagram app for Android appears to be a beta version. Or rather, Alpha.

Meta’s communication is clear: everything works like clockwork, functions are available simultaneously on both operating systems, and the social network works on any mobile phone. The reality is that Android app is a disaster with bugs that can be present in the application for months and no one does anything.

It seems like no one in the Meta offices has an Android phone with which to log into Instagram and realize that every week something doesn’t work out. I myself have tested about 15 Android phones over the course of 2025, and in all of them I have had the same errors, day after day. This is not something isolated to the device brand or specific version: The app doesn’t work well unless you install it on your iPhone.

A simple look at forums like Reddit already shows that users are more than unhappy, but I’m not going to go that far: these are just some of the problems that I myself have encountered with Instagram over the past year. Worst? Some – or rather, most – They haven’t been fixed for months.. MONTHS. In an application that is used by 2000 million monthly users.

• Stories repeat themselves. Randomly, there are times when the stories you saw from a user are returned to the home page, and every time you open the Instagram app, they are still there. This glitch doesn’t always happen, but it has remained unsolved for years.
• Empty profiles. Last week, Instagram for Android spent over 48 hours showing all profiles with no posts. You logged into any user’s account and it showed up with the message “No messages”. Almost three days to fix a serious problem in an application used by millions of people every day.
• Blocked carousels. For months, posts with multiple images have been blocked on the first page without promotion. This doesn’t always happen, but every now and then the error appears again, implying that no one plans to fix it.
• Elements that disappear. This has now been fixed, but it has been in the app for over six months now. When you logged into your profile, there was no login button to the settings menu. For it to appear, you had to go to your feed and return to your profile. This error has been present in the application for more than six months and has no solution. As if no one on Instagram noticed such a mistake.
• Reels that freeze. I don’t know how long this problem has existed in the app, but I know it has gotten worse in recent weeks. It doesn’t matter what kind of connection you have: some Reels stop a few seconds after launch and are impossible to complete. There are no problems with the network, because if you go to the next video, it plays normally.

Instagram is the best advertisement for Apple

As I mentioned at the beginning, I spent a week with the iPhone 17: none of the above was in Instagram for iOS. The social network worked perfectly and almost nothing went wrong.

Buying an iPhone is no longer just an excuse for the influencers on duty: anyone who uses the social network will have a completely different iOS experience. It doesn’t matter if your Android costs 1200 or 300 euros, Instagram has been abandoned by the hand of God from the Google ecosystem as if no one cares.

I’m not criticizing the situation because of the inability to come to terms with Instagram’s failures, not at all. The problem here is not that the app has problems, which is completely normal, but the lack of fixes in the social network, which some use at the risk of seeming redundant. 2 billion people per month. Most of them do this from an Android mobile phone.

The situation becomes even more grotesque when you realize that the conglomerate that runs the social network The three most popular apps on the planet are: WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram itself. This is not a startup or someone from their garage that is dying of success.