How Much Does It Cost To Develop An App Like Instagram?
How Much Does It Cost To Develop An App Like Instagram?
Mobile applications across various categories are driving the digital conduct of industries. Uber in online can booking, Swiggy and Zomato in online food delivering, Paytm and GPay in online money transfer segments are on the peak positions today.
On the other side, entertainment, chatting, and social media apps like Facebook and Instagram, and Whatsapp are also on top in their categories. These interactive platforms are highly responsive and connecting people across the globe within seconds.
In this article, we would like to give you a complete guide on a popular photos/videos/reals sharing social networking app, Instagram.
What is Instagram?
Instagram is an excellent social media app that is gaining popularity since its inception in 2010. It is enabling people to connect all the time and share photos and videos all at free of cost.
The app also allows users to create and upload short videos up to up to 15 seconds. Further, it facilitates users to add photos or videos to their Insta stories for sharing their lovely moments with their friends and followers.
Key Information of Instagram
- Owner: Instagram is owned by Facebook, Inc since 2012
- Date of Launch: 6th October 2010
- OS Compatibility: iOS, Android, Windows, Fire OS
- Language Support: English, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish, etc.
- App Rating: 4.7/5 (on Apple Store) and 3.8/5 (on Google Play)
- Downloads: 1,000,000,000+
Attracting Features of trending networking apps like Instagram
- Create and Edit Profile
This feature enables users to register and access the app functionalities without any trouble. Giving flexibility to users to log in through their social media accounts will also help you increase customer retention rates.
- Photographic filters
Instagram offers a bundle of photographic filters that help users edit their photos as they like. The more attractive filter of Instagram is the Lux filter. Its effects are marvelous. Users can lighten shadows or darken highlights with this innovative filter.
- Create and Share Videos
At initial, Instagram is purely designed for sharing photos. Later, with users’ demand and to gain more popularity, in 2013, Instagram extend the features list with a 15-second video sharing option. Later, the video limit is increased to one minute since 2016.
- Share Album
Instagram Albums allow users to share 10 minutes of video with photos in one post at a time.
- Explore or Search Feature
This feature allows users to search and view popular photos taken at nearby locations. It also allows users to explore trending tags and locations. Moreover, enhanced functionalities such as Videos You Might Like and Events channels displays featuring videos from shows and other live events.
- Crazy Reels
Insta reels is another best feature that took its part in the app’s popularity. Users can create instant short entertainment videos using built-in soundtracks from other posts. This feature allows users to record 15- 30 second long short reels videos with this feature.
- Instagram Direct
This feature allows users to chat with their friends, family members, and followers through the private messaging option.
- Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories feature allows users to take photos, add filters, and add them to their Instagram story tab. Uploaded images will be automatically disappeared after 24 hours. Users can also check the likes and comments they got for their photos. Users can also stream and add live video clips to their stories.
With the integration of Augmented Reality (AR)-powered stickers, the most famous social networking application like Instagram also offer face editing filters and encourages users to add visual effects to their faces.
Further, with the launch of the “Story Highlights” feature in 2017, Instagram enables users to view popular stories below their profile picture.
- For Advertisements
Instagram is one of the best applications to promote products and services in feeds. It allows enterprises to share photos (for 5-second) and 15-second video ads between stories. The latest live shopping feature will allow businesses to add 30 products and display them on live video streaming.
This will help businesses promote their brand and reach the targeted audience faster. Moreover, with the implementation of the carousel ads feature, the app also enabling advertisers to display many images with an option to link relevant information.
- Instagram Shop
This feature enables users to access a list of products from global brands in minutes. Users can view products and add items for checkout.
- Instagram Checkout
Now, Instagram has become the best platform for in-app purchasing and selling products. If the users are interested to buy a brand’s products that were displayed on stories can immediately check the price details using the Instagram checkout option without quitting from the app.
- Facebook Pay
Just like Amazon Pay, Facebook Pay featured in the Instagram app is a highly secure and smart way for payments. By authenticating unique PINs, touch, or face ID, people can make the payment process with more confidence.
- Geo-location
Geo-location feature plays a vital role in social media apps development. This feature allows users to give access to their location while posting photos or videos. This is purely for security purposes. If any photos are restricted to post, it will be easy for authorities to trace their location.
What Technologies Plays a Vital Role to Develop Instagram-like Trending Social Media app?
Here is the right technology stack to develop an Instagram-like application.
Programming Languages
- For Android: Java, JavaScript
- For iOS: Objective-C
DevOps For Android and iOS
- JS Build Tool: WebPack
- JS Compiler: Babel
- Load Balancer and Reverse Proxy: HAProxy
- JS Testing Framework: Jest
- Monitoring: Sentry
- Server Configuration And Automation: Fabric
Framework and Libraries
- React Native
- React
- Django
- Redux.JS
Why A Social Networking App Like Instagram Development Is Profitable?
Why investing in Instagram when we have so many other social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, and all. The below statistics will break your queries and let you know the app demand and how crazy people are about Instagram.
The app downloads app are surprisingly crossing beyond the expectations every year. This social networking photo/video sharing application is gaining positive responses from all over the world and is especially popular in India and the USA. As of Statista, India and United States have the highest audience size of 180 million and 170 million respectively, as of July 2021.
The below figure depicts the list of the leading countries based on Instagram audience size as of the second quarter of 2021.
On the users front, Instagram is giving stiff competition to trending mobile apps like Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp. The active users count of Instagram rapidly growing over the past few years. According to Statista, the app stood in the list of top five popular social networking apps. As of July 2021, Instagram has approximately 1.3 billion active users.
Here is an image that tells you how Instagram is giving competition to other social media apps.
Of the total of 1.3 billion active users, nearly 32% of global Instagram lovers are 25-34 years of old. And another 30% of audiences were aged between 18-24 years of old. It means that by developing an Instagram-like app, your business can target audiences of 18-35 years and can get increased downloads and profits as well.
Here is a rough chart of Instagram lovers by age:
With these positive statistics, one can analyze the future scope of social networking apps like Instagram development.
USM Business Systems, with over two decades of experience in the mobile app development industry, build world-class mobile apps on android, iOS, and Windows platforms. Being the best mobile app development company in the USA and India, we create feature-rich mobile applications that are integrated with cutting-edge technologies.
We build the best native android apps, native iOS apps, and hybrid or cross-platform apps within promised development time. Get in touch to know the development cost of Instagram-like social networking apps.
The Development cost of the best mobile app like Instagram
The estimation of the development cost of an app like Instagram depends on various factors, including platform type (either iOS or Android), app type (either native or hybrid), features list, design complexity, and many more.
Along with basic features like account profile, profile editing, video/photo uploading, filters, chatting, likes/comment section, and photo editing features, integrating the app with social media profiles and geo-location features will also impact the overall development cost of the Instagram-like application.
Along with the feature, as we mentioned, the app’s UI/UX design will also impact the estimated cost of social media apps development. A simple and impressive UI with a decent logo will help your application get featured in the app stores.
We, being the leading mobile app development services provider in the USA and India, can roughly estimate the cost to develop an app like Instagram. It would be around $50,000 to $60,000. It might be increase based on your app requirements and its complexity level.
Get a Free Quote for Your Android/iOS App Development Project!
How Long Does It Take To Create An Instagram-like photo/video sharing application?
The app development time depends on the complexity of your application and the mobile app development whom you choose for getting your app developed. On average, the time to develop a mobile application like Instagram will take 5-7 months.
Hiring USM like a popular mobile app developer (in the USA) is a benefit, and you can launch your application into the targeted markets with jet speed. We are the most trusted mobile application development company in India. We have a team of highly skilled Android and iOS app developers, UI/UX designers, and a brilliant QA team for making a flawless application that takes your business to new heights.
