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There are few apps more synonymous with the iPhone than Instagram. It was one of the earliest defining apps on the smartphone, with an ascent made hand-in-hand with Apples App Store. Instagram wouldn’t even go to Android for a full two years. Which is why, through another lens, its absurd that over 15 years, Instagram never launched a dedicated iPad app. Instead, its loyalists have been stuck with a tiny version of the iPhone app running on their iPad screens. That is until today: Instagram is now rolling out its first official iPad app. The companys head of design, Brett Westervelt, took me on an exclusive first tourexplaining the companys evolving strategy to design its way across new platforms. Instagram wants to be everywhere Instagram is something of an aging teen in an internet thats changing every day, but its still bonkers-big. It added an estimated 150 million users between 2022 and 2024 alone, bringing it to 1.4 billion users globally. But naturally, its growth has slowed with scale, and it’s projecting 4.4% growth this year. The same is not true about Instagrams monetization. Its revenue is projected to grow 24% this year to reach $32 billion (which is in part attributed to its Reels videos). Instagram is an impossibly important platform for Meta in that it now generates more than half the revenue of the company overall. [Image: Instagram] From a business perspective, it makes sense that Meta wants to have Instagram available anywhere and everywhere, and as Westervelt explains, the company has spent the last few years considering emerging formats beyond mobileas it considers a world welcoming AR headsets, foldable phones, and new form factors that break the slab smartphone were so used to. Westervelt says that the iPhone was a convergence moment for technology; it became the de facto platform to design on and around. But I think the thing that we started to see a couple of years ago was it does kind of feel like we’re in a divergence moment again,” he says. “So as we just thought about where Instagram was headed and where it was important to take our interfaces, we became more and more convinced that we needed to flex and begin to expand to some of these other form factors . . . [to] be where our community is. A few years ago, Instagram developed its first interface for Samsung and Google foldable phones, and it launched a VR experience on its Quest headset last year. For 2025, the team opted to focus on the iPada decision that might seem surprising a full 15 years into Instagrams life. The iPad is by no means the newest, shiniest tech platform out there (and iPads represent less than 10% of Apples revenue). But Instagram would also be unwise to ignore it at the expense of pursuing shinier platforms. Apple still sold 52 million iPads in 2024, owning about a third of the tablet market by estimates, making it the sort of quietly gargantuan business that only a company like Apple could make feel insignificant. [Image: Instagram] The new design leans back and in When the Instagram design team began working on the iPad app earlier this year, they anchored everything in what makes Instagram work. The core of the service, according to Westervelt, is to be connected with friends and then inspired and entertained by all of the best creativity in the world. But to realize that vision anew, much of the process involved prototyping designs and testing it in their own livesbefore mercilessly rebuilding the experience. A lot of these things we found our way towards by having a build and just, like, ripping on itreally living with the app, says Westervelt. [Image: Instagram] When you open Instagram on iPad for the first time, it still looks like Instagram with its Stories sitting as bubbles on top and a central feed of media. The first big change youll notice is that a navigation bar now sits on the left side of the screen. The second big change might take you a moment: The central feed is no longer your main feed. Instead, its Reels. Instagram welcomes you with big screen video (and in portrait mode, those reels feel almost cinematic in scale as they fill the screen). No doubt, the design team must have felt incentivized to push Reels, which are proving successful for Instagram in the age of TikTok. Westervelt, however, insists that having Reels front and center was inspired by the way we use iPads versus phones. iPads, the team confirmed, are built for lazing on the couch. We kept finding ourselves jumping to the Reels tab . . . because you kind of want to be in this entertaining, lean back mode, and Reels is really good for that, says Westervelt. [Image: Instagram] The decision hardly feels controlling, as Instagram designers are actually using the extra screen real estate to allow a lot more customization over experience. Your feed is now in a tab that features three organizational views listed in a top bar. The first is your feed as it is today. The second is your friends (people you follow who follow you back). And the third is latest, a classic reverse chronological feed that puts everything into the order it was posted. [Image: Instagram] These feeds are more complex than Instagram is on phones, and thats the point. This is kind of going to be more of a power-user feature, says Westervelt. And indeed, Instagram is also using panelsjust swipe right or tap on the right side of your screen to pull up commentsto juggle Instagram’s spartan aesthetic with tools that let you stretch out and drill down in ways that are tricky on the phone. Westervelt even frames the Messages tab as a productivity toolallowing you to follow conversations across Instagram and Threads in an efficient, contained space. In other words, when people arent leaning back with their iPads, Instagram expects them to be leaning in, poking and prodding at a more complex interface with gusto. [Image: Instagram] Westervelt insists these changes arent following Apples decision to make the iPad interface a lot more like a laptops, but the Instagram design team is clearly optimizing for people who want to quickly manage more in the app. I can see how welcome these slight organizational features could be for social media managers or creators, and Westervelt teases that Instagram will soon use the larger screen to offer more robust video editing. In this sense, it appears that Instagram for iPad will take a more-is-more approach, albeit with a UX that keeps getting out of the way of all the content. One notable spot you can see the teams restraint is in how you navigate Stories. When you swipe between each story, Instagram on the phone uses a 3D rotating cube transition. (Trust me, you know this animation, even if you can’t spot it in your mind’s eye.) For iPad, they ditched it in favor of a somewhat flatter, 2D frame-to-frame swap. We initially wanted to bring that to iPad because it just felt like a kind of iconic thing. We have some equity in it, was Westervelt. But the thing we were finding is, it just felt really heavy. [Image: Instagram] An upgraded experience To any poor user who has been suffering through Instagram on their iPad, theres no doubt that they are in for an upgrade. And to the teams credit, it really does seem to walk the line between a mindless visual candy machine, and a functional interface offering you the next level of control. In this sense, the new Instagram app is playing it both ways: It wants to own the couch and the desk, to be a consumption machine and a creative tool. With its increased real estate, perhaps it will succeed in both regards. What the design team wants to know from here is not just if their design works for users, but if it might actually impact what were sharing on it. I think the thing that will be kind of interesting to see is, does having a bigger form factor like this also change what creators create? muses Westervelt. Because if it can, Instagram could be about to get even bigger.
Category:
E-Commerce
Anyone who has stopped into a Starbucks over the past couple of years knows how exhausted the staff is. Headcount was quietly cut in the 2020s, stress went up, and the experience got worse for customers and baristas alike. (Six straight quarters of same-store sales decline will tell you exactly how thats worked out for Starbucks.) But under CEO Brian Niccol, who was appointed last year, the company is architecting a turnaround. And Starbucks just had its best week of sales ever. Much of Niccols plan comes down to increasing its staff in stores while also making their lives easier. How? The latest example is a new time-saving AI tool that promises to free up tens of thousands of hours across the company every week as its baristas do inventory. The new Starbucks AI inventory tool Typically, inventory has been a by-hand process at Starbucks. A couple times a week, an employee will spend about an hour scanning through all of the milks, syrups, and other ingredients, marking down counts on paper so that more of whatever is needed can be ordered and replenished. A new solution developed with NomadGo largely automates this work. Instead of counting by hand, baristas can simply aim a tablet at their stock, and AI-infused 3D vision processing will handle the rest. As items are accounted for, they light up on the screen. How is it possibly accurate? Counting stuff is the sort of work AI can do these days, sure, but it also appears to help that Starbucks keeps its items organized in pretty predictable patterns so theyre more straightforward to analyze. According to early test stores, taking inventory with this system drops the task from an hour to about 10 or 15 minutes. (Though maybe disregard that the system does appear to miss one bottle in the videothe company is claiming >99% accuracy.) Starbucks isnt the first company to consider using vision-AI tablets to manage inventory (Walmart, for instance, uses an augmented reality app to help its employees find the right box on the shelf.) At scale, though, the impact appears significant. If its early tests are any indication, Starbucks could save 45 minutes of labor, about twice a week, across the 11,000 North American stores that are adopting the system. Back of napkin math puts that at 16,500 hours saved a week. (Starbucks insists such barista efficiencies introduced under Niccol wont be used to reduce headcounts, but to improve customer experience.) In this case, Starbucks will be using a significant chunk of this time saved to simply do inventory more frequentlyperhaps as often as daily, according to the company. Even at that frequency, Starbucks could still save nearly an hour a week in the fastest stores, all while ensuring its healthier menu with protein cold foams arent out of stock.
Category:
E-Commerce
Via Transportation, a startup that aims to reimagine public transportation, has filed for an initial public offering (IPO), the latest tech-focused company seeking to take advantage of growing investor interest in new listings amid a recent wave of high-dollar exits. The New York-based firm and some of its existing shareholders plan to offer roughly 10.7 million shares, targeting a range between $40 and $44 a piece, Via said on Wednesday. At that price, the company would have a valuation as high as $3.5 billion. The offering is being led by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Allen & Company, and Wells Fargo Securities. It comes as more high-profile tech companies are moving forward with long-awaited IPOs after tariff uncertainty had prompted caution. Just yesterday, by-now, pay-later company Klarna Group said it will seek to raise as much as $1.27 billion in a public offering that it had reportedly put on hold earlier this year. Successful listings from tech companies ranging from Chime Financial to Figma appear to have eased worries about how the macro environment might impact the broader IPO market. What does Via Transportation do? Founded in 2012, Via partners with local governments and public transit agencies to offer a range of transportation solutions, including operating software, passenger apps, tech-enabled services, and data. The company, which says it makes 90% of its revenue from government partnerships, operates a platform that is available in large cities such as New York and London, along with rural areas in places like Montana. “For too long, public transit services had relied on 40-foot busses following circuitous routs,” Daniel Ramot, Via’s cofounder and CEO, said in a prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). “We had a new idea. We were going to replace these underutilized buses with dynamically routed shuttles guided by data and powerful algorithms.” Is Via profitable? Not yet, but its losses are narrowing. In its SEC filing, the company reported a net loss of $90.6 million in 2024, compared to a net loss of $117 million the year before. It warned in the filing that it may never maintain or even achieve profitability. That’s not uncommon for a rapidly growing startup. Via said its revenue ballooned from $100 million to $337.6 million between 2021 and 2024. Via Technologies plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol Via. It has not announced a listing date but said on Wednesday that it has begun the launch of its “roadshow.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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