How To Create an App like Instagram?

The art of photography has evolved in recent times especially due to intrusion of digital technology. It has become a common part of social life, becoming more affordable than it was earlier. With the advent of image sharing apps like Instagram and Flickr, the socio-cultural sphere observed a fundamental shift in photography culture, which ultimately engendered a whole new cult of photo sharers.

Mobile technology has replaced the expensive high-quality professional camera, enabling the common populace to use their smartphone to capture and instantly share photos with their friends.

Thanks to social apps like Instagram that pioneered the new trend among active social media users. Instagram has more than 400 million users who post 80 million pictures on a daily basis. Created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in 2010, Instagram is the kind of app many startup entrepreneurs attempt to clone and develop.

So how would you approach the idea of developing an app just like Instagram? Here is what you must consider.

Essential Components of Instagram Clone App

If you are determined to finally create a mobile app that will satisfy the photo editing and sharing needs of users and compete with Instagram, then you must think over all the essential components and interactive features that users usually seek.

• Authorization: Users can create a new profile through a sign up process with their email or social accounts

• Profile Editing: Add, delete or edit personal details
• Activity log: User explore the activity log section to check their recent activities and actions within the app. Likes, comments and sharing of photos, follow, unfollow, other users’ post and activities on your page.
• Post pictures: Upload and share photos, tag or mention other people, and what it is about with a personal expression or hashtags
• Timeline: Users can view a brief of profile, followers, feed and tags
• Customization: Users can make changes to uploaded photos; crop, rotate, filter and enhance
• Social features: Enables ability to share posts, chat, invite or send request to contacts
• Geo-location: The app detects users’ location data through pictures captured using the app
• Messenger: Send messages, text and media files to your followers and friends
• Settings: Users are able to change or see the exiting social account settings
• Banners and captions: Users can additionally make banners out of photos using supporting captions
• Push-notifications: Users will be notified via push message alerts to explore new updates or engage with more exciting stuff inside the app
• Search: Advanced search engine can help find new people using username, hashtags or post description

Design

Without having a great design aesthetics, users will not feel attracted enough to use your app. Hence, consider the idea of building a simple yet dazzling app interface.

Instagram offers simple, elegant and easy-to-use interface that has stunned millions of users across the world. So, employ a creative UI/UX designer to address the need to build robust and interactive design elements using simple and elegant graphics, icons combined with beautiful colors.

Read also : 24 Best Social Media Apps 2021

The Key Factors To Consider During App Development

While creating a clone of Instagram app, you will not only require some attractive features but also a complete understanding of how to beat the rivals and make it unique and outstanding in the relevant market. Your first goal is to acquire good number of users with an appealing value proposition for users and a set of fresh ideas.

Listed here are a few key indicators that will help you create loyal customers and a superior brand.

1. User Acquisition

User acquisition may add expenses to your capital investment. Done right, the strategic actions performed to attract users will eventually generate loyal traffic. Using powerful analytics, you will be able to monitor the statistics on new and lost users and what it is that grows user base.

Referral programs for affiliate marketing will have users share and invite new friends in return for a specific reward. Design special features or filters to give away to users who leave constructive feedback and refer more new users.

Marketing your app on social media by making social members talk about the product is another effective way to capture more audience. Create social pages, campaigns and employ media marketing influencers to do the job 3-4 months before the launch.

2. User Engagement

User engagement is all about making people read and notice your media activities and spend more time and opinions in your app. Keep an eye on user’s involvement through their daily activities.

Integrate different social functions within your app to allow users to share and comment on the posts. Create features like friends, groups, channels, special feeds, live stories, etc.

To engage further, you must hire skilled developers who can work on creative editing tools that provide users additional power to do more with photos. This is what has made Instagram achieve a great boost in overall engagement.

3. User Retention

Once engaged, users must keep coming back to your app for consistent growth. For this to happen, make sure you adopt best user retention strategy.

If a user has not visited your app in a while, notify them gently by sending a meaningful, less obtrusive push notifications to draw their attention to interesting bits in your app. Try to be in trends for much of your user base would be young audience who are fond of digital life.

Retention also depends on how often you consider and implement on users’ feedback since it goes to indicate that you truly care about user experience and can empathize with their concerns.

4. Personalization

With apps like Instagram and Flicker already ruling the digital photo sharing socials, you need something that helps you create a hot wave. Having personalized elements can be a winning approach due to its ability to make your app competitive.

Users crave features that allows them to design their homepage and menus the way they desire. For example, Twitter facilitates changing the color combination for all the users to make the experience more enjoyable and personalized. Facebook, on the other hand, makes sure users can try various backgrounds for sharing their post.

Monetization

Your mobile app business needs tangible return. In fact, this is the promise with which developers build a feature-rich Instagram clone. You can try multiple methods and approaches to monetize your app and generate consistent revenue stream.

1. In-app s:

This is the most common approach found in many of today’s social apps. Create unique tools and filters and special effects using your creative imagination to give users a memorable experience on smallest price.

2. Advertising:

Like famous social media apps (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter), your app can also display ads to promote businesses that pay you certain amount in return.

3. Special offers:

For loyal and active users, it is a great gesture to weave unique offers and special deals to make more profit.

Testing

After incorporating all the essential mobile app development steps, it is now time to head for testing the application.

The purpose of testing is to bring the best possible quality of your app by eliminating the smallest of bugs that may spoil user’s time with your app. Also, make sure users can operate your Instagram-like app on all popular devices.

Deployment

Post testing phase comes the final phase called App deployment. At this moment, the developers who have created a high-quality, flawless Instagram clone app will deploy your app with photo and video sharing capabilities on a server and also in the App Stores so that users can easily discover and access it.

Summarizing App Development Strategy

• Research and analyze the market for clarity and inspiration
• Find investors to kick-start your project
• Collaborate with competent developers or hire a reputed app development company
• Design and develop an MVP of the product
• Add unique features and functionality
• Test the final product to ensure the highest quality
• Expand your app marketing strategy and spread the word months before the launch

Conclusion

Instagram is an unrivalled leader dominating the world of picture sharing. So before you get your hands on creating an app like Instagram, delve deep into the relevant market nerve to discover what works and what needs be avoided.

Keep an eye on your rivals to recognize current trends. As apps of this kind also work as a marketing tool for users, your Instagram alternative should be scalable to incorporate future improvements and engaging updates.