So it finally happened. Instagram landed on Android this week, three days ago now if you're counting, and my phone has already eaten through about 400MB of data because everyone I follow decided to re-photograph their coffee within about six hours of the app going live.
I've been on a Galaxy Nexus since December and up until Tuesday my options for "make a bad photo look artistically bad" were things like PicPlz and Lightbox, neither of which anyone I know actually used. Instagram had 15 months as an iOS-only thing and honestly it started to feel less like an app and more like a little clubhouse. You'd see the square photos show up on Twitter and just kind of shrug because you couldn't play along. Well now I can, and I have to admit, the Earlybird filter makes my kitchen look like it belongs to someone with their life together, which it does not.
The install itself was a little rough — it hung on "processing" for a good 20 seconds on first launch, which for an app that size and that much hype felt like a lot. But once it's in, it's in. I set up an account under my usual handle (taken already on their servers because apparently a bunch of people cybersquatted usernames the second Android support got announced, which is a very 2012 thing to do), and by the time I went to bed Tuesday I had eleven followers I've never spoken to.
Two things stick out to me about this launch that I don't think get said enough. One, the filters aren't actually that different from what a halfway decent Photoshop action could do in 2009, we've just decided a mobile app doing it in three taps counts as innovation now, and I guess it does, because it works. Two, I'm a little annoyed that my Nexus, which is a genuinely nice phone, still feels like a second-class citizen for app launches. iOS gets everything first. It happened with Instagram, it happens with games, it'll probably happen again next month with something else. I don't think that's a conspiracy, I just think building for one screen size and one OS version spread is easier than building for the fifty flavors of Android running around out there, but it doesn't make it less annoying to wait a year and a half for a camera filter app.
The other thing everyone's been passing around this week is that Google video, the one with the glasses. Project Glass, they're calling it. If you haven't seen it, it's about ninety seconds of someone walking through New York with a heads-up display floating in their vision, checking the weather, getting subway directions, video-calling someone while looking at a bookstore window. It's very slick. It's also very obviously a concept video and not a product, and I think a lot of people are talking about it this week like Google is going to start selling these things at Best Buy next to the Chromebooks.
My buddy Dave sent it to me Wednesday night with the message "we live in the future now" and I sort of get the impulse, the video is genuinely well made, but I've watched enough tech demo videos over the years to know the gap between "here's a rendered mockup of what this could feel like" and "here's a thing you can buy" is usually measured in years, not months. Doesn't mean it's not interesting. A camera and a display you wear on your face is a real idea, not a gimmick, and Google's the kind of company with enough Android and Maps and search infrastructure lying around to actually pull something like this off eventually. I just wouldn't hold my breath for a release date announcement anytime soon.
Anyway. Between the Instagram thing and the Glass video it's been a decent week for people who like watching companies figure out what a phone camera is actually for. I still think the square crop on Instagram is a dumb limitation with no real technical reason behind it in 2012, but I'll complain about that some other time. Right now I've got a backlog of terrible photos to run through Hudson and Toaster before anyone notices I only got the app because everyone else had it first.