Windows Phone Users Can Finally Experience The Joys Of Instagram

Today Instagram is finally available for the Windows Phone-with just one tiny flaw. You can’t actually capture videos in the app, and capturing a photo is complicated.

Though initial reports said that users couldn’t capture photos with the Instagram app, our own Dan Rowinski reports that it works just fine-it just takes you to the camera roll first. The app brings users to the external Windows Phone native camera as opposed to an Instagram camera, but most people won’t notice as it brings you straight back to the app with the photo you have taken ready to crop and add filters to. Video capturing isn’t currently available.

The Instagram app available through the Windows Phone Marketplace claims to be a beta of the app so it is likely that the Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform will issue updates to the app soon.

Instagram wanted to release an app as quickly as possible, so it focused on Instagram’s core features and will continue to develop the product to bring additional features in the future.

“Most people upload photos from their camera roll, so with the beta version of the Windows Phone, we’re starting with the experience most people already use,” a spokesperson for Instagram said.

Instagram had been reluctant to build an app for Windows Phone, but Nokia announced last month that an Instagram app was in fact in the works. Nokia’s Lumia 1020 is arguably the best smartphone camera on the market, so it makes sense that the company would want the premier photo sharing service on its phones.

It seems as though Instagram for Windows Phone is optimized specifically for the high-quality images the smartphone cameras produce, or so the manager of the Windows Phone team Joe Belfiore tweeted earlier today.

One discussion we had with Insta was the fact that many people post picks they took with their camera…

— joebelfiore (@joebelfiore) November 20, 2013

… and on #WP we have *amazing* camera apps like Nok Pro Cam. So, Instagram on WP optimized more for that case. Fits the platform.

— joebelfiore (@joebelfiore) November 20, 2013