How to Release Your App Without Disaster

Instagram: A Case Study

Pretty much everyone has heard of Instagram nowadays - a very popular photo- and video-sharing social media platform that lets people freely connect with people around the world. In an interview with Guy Raz on the NPR podcast How I Built This, the founders expand on the history that many people who use the site are unaware of.

Instagram began as a social networking site where people could share pictures of where they were at any time and provide captions. As they were popular, venture capitalists provided funding for them to grow and expand.

However, the moment of truth came when they uploaded their app to the App Store at midnight. Dozens of people came pouring in, so much so that the single server they had overloaded, and the site became unusable.

In the modern day, such a thing would have sunk that company and app for good. In a stroke of luck, mobile networks were bad at the time, so people blamed mobile networks for crashing the app instead of blaming the company and their servers.

The founders failed to consider three main points when launching their app on the Apple Store. Firstly, the Apple store is a global application that anyone in the world can download from. Secondly, midnight in their timezone could be a reasonable waking hour for others. For example, midnight in Tokyo is 8:00 AM in California. Thirdly, many people in those countries would assume that if it was on the international app store, the servers could handle everyone downloading and using the app. If they had used project management and discussed what they wanted, they could have avoided the situation entirely.

Another potentially disastrous incident was after Instagram was acquired by Facebook, now Meta. When updating their Terms and Conditions, the lawyers included a line that was interpreted as “Instagram can use any of your photos in advertising without your consent.” Many people were scared by the implications and stopped using the app entirely. This did not stop until the founders publicly apologized and updated the Terms and Conditions to be more direct.

While they did handle the situation well, this could have been avoided if they had collaborated with the lawyers on what exactly they wanted the Terms and Conditions to say and what specifically to avoid.