2010
Instagram launches
A small San Francisco startup puts a photo app with filters and square frames on the App Store, and a million people sign up within two months.
On October 6, 2010, a free app called Instagram appeared in Apple’s App Store. It did one thing well: you took a picture with your iPhone, ran it through a filter, and shared it with the people who followed you. Every image sat in a square frame of 640 pixels, which matched the width of the iPhone screen at the time.
The app had started life as something else. Kevin Systrom and the Brazilian engineer Mike Krieger had been building Burbn, a check-in app, in San Francisco, and in March 2010 Systrom raised $500,000 in seed money for it. The two founders decided Burbn was too close to Foursquare, but they noticed that people liked its photo feature. They cut everything else and renamed the project Instagram, a blend of “instant camera” and “telegram.”
The response was immediate. Instagram counted one million registered users by December 2010, about two months after launch, and 10 million within a year. In February 2011 it raised $7 million from investors in a deal that valued the company at around $20 million.
Why it matters
Instagram showed how quickly a simple mobile idea could grow into a global habit. When the Android version arrived on April 3, 2012, it was downloaded more than one million times in less than a day. Six days later, Facebook agreed to buy the company for about $1 billion in cash and stock, and promised to keep running it independently. The press compared the price with the $35 million that Yahoo had paid for Flickr in 2005. By June 2018 the service had reached one billion users.
Over the years the app moved far beyond square photos, adding video, direct messages, Stories, and Reels, and it became a central stage for advertising and personal branding. Its influence has drawn criticism too, especially research and reporting on how it affects the mental health and body image of teenagers. Few apps launched in 2010 have shaped daily life as much.
Did you know?
The first photo ever posted to Instagram came months before the public launch. Mike Krieger shared a picture of South Beach Harbor at Pier 38 in San Francisco at 5:26 p.m. on July 16, 2010.
