At long last, Instagram finally gets around to launching an official iPad app

• Instagram for the iPad is available now
• It arrives 14 years after the original iPhone app launch
• The app includes a new Following tab

It's been one of the strangest anomalies in tech for several years, the lack of an official Instagram app for the iPad, but Meta's engineers have finally found time to right this wrong: Instagram for the iPad is available now.

If you own one of Apple's tablets, you can now settle back and enjoy Instagram Feeds, Stories, and Reels on a larger screen. Reels will be what pop up first, because Instagram reckons these are perfect for lean-back entertainment (and also because... TikTok).

"People have asked for this for a while," says the announcement blog post with a straight face. "We've taken the time to design an experience that optimizes your favorite parts of Instagram for a bigger screen."

Instagram for iOS made its debut in February 2011, and requests for an iPad app started almost immediately. While apps gradually appeared for Android, the web, and even Windows Mobile over the years, demands for an iPad app were politely swatted away.

A new Following tab

You get a full suite of features for creating new content in the iPad app, just as you do in the iPhone equivalent. You can also access your Instagram inbox (with the conversation list and the chats themselves side by side) and your activity and notification feeds.

There is one new screen here, called Following. It has three tabs: All (posts from accounts you follow), Friends (posts from people you follow and who follow you back), and Latest (posts from accounts you follow, in chronological order).

It'll be interesting to see if this tab makes its way into Instagram's other apps: As per the announcement, it was introduced in response to "requests for easier ways to make sure you're not missing updates from your favorite accounts".

Based on a quick glance at the app, it seems to do a decent job of making use of the extra screen space. You should find the Instagram app for iPad available now in the Apple App Store, and it can be downloaded for free for any tablet running iPadOS 15.1 or later.

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