• The Next Web, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 12:24 PM

As if there was any doubt that Instagram would be a hit among Android users, the photo-sharing app was downloaded over a million times within 24-hours of its debut, this week. On Tuesday, Google Play -- the company’s new app market --- recorded over 2,000 sign-ups a minute, “ensuring that [Instagram] has become one of the biggest app releases on the [Android] platform in its history,” writes The Next Web.

To date, Instagram had amassed over 30 million users on Apple’s iOS mobile operating system alone. Still, as many consumers and analysts have asked, what took the company so long to launch an Android-friendly app? At the SXSW conference last month, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said he and his team were simply too busy scaling on Apple’s iOS.

“I don’t think it took us so long,” he told TechCrunch at the time. “We just had priorities. Had we tried to be both on Android and iPhone at the same time, it would’ve been tough to innovate in the way that we have.” Without revealing overall engagement levels, Systrom also said that among users who were active during a single week in early March, 67% used the app on the Saturday prior to SXSW.

Read the whole story at The Next Web »