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Comment by Zaheer | Hacker News Reader

This conveniently rolls out at around the same time as sponsored updates. It's important to note that there are a lot of Instagram clients on Windows Phone already including the more popular 6tag (http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/6tag/7d795cdf-fb...).

One of 6tag's features is supposedly 'hide sponsored posts (beta)' which really highlights the urgency as to why Instagram would need to build their own client.

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    >One of 6tag's features is supposedly 'hide sponsored posts (beta)' which really highlights the urgency as to why Instagram would need to build their own client.

It would take all of 10 minutes for Instagram to shut down 6tag if they decided to kill it because of the ad hiding feature.

All they would have to do is call Microsoft and tell them to shut it down, an OFFICIAL Instagram client has been one of the "must haves" for the platform and is often cited when tech pundits complain about the anemic Windows Phone app ecosystem. If Microsoft caved on their own WP Youtube app that hid ads they wouldn't hesitate to nuke an indie dev's app if it threatened the adoption of WP with a high profile service provider like Instagram.

Not refuting what you're saying but also... they could just kill the API keys.

Recreating the core Instagram experience is directly against the ToS for the Instagram API.

Why use the official API? Just MITM a 1st party client to find the endpoints it uses. Last time I checked IG only used SSL for login, everything else was clear text. Why no one hasn't has made a firesheep for IG I do not know. Think of the mischief one could cause!

Are you sure that they don't enforce SSL all over? That's the whole point of OAuth2 getting rid of signed request :(

IIRC I don't think it's OAuth. It's (or was when I last looked ~6 months ago) a different API using a session cookie, and yes I'm sure :)

I would be shocked if the timing on this release wasn't at least tangentially related to sponsored posts.

I think this is going one of two ways: Either the official client is a quick bid to incentive Microsoft to remove 6tag the same way Microsoft replaced their YouTube app with a gutted one, or Instagram think their official client is going to rapidly eclipse the "knockoffs" and they won't have to worry about it.

Keep in mind that while Microsoft did cave on their own YouTube app, it wasn't in exchange for nothing at all. They still got to keep a gutted "official" YouTube client in order to fill checkboxes in pundit comparison reviews.

    >I would be shocked if the timing on this release wasn't at least tangentially related to sponsored posts.

I'd agree with that, I was just disagreeing with the theory that an indie developer's app that allowed ad hiding somehow forced Instagram's hand.

They didn't 'cave' on the YouTube app. Google wouldn't allow it and was using it as a means to wage ecosystem warfare.

It was a pretty stupid/ugly fight that went back and forth: http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/15/4624706/google-blocks-wind...

Google enforced their pre-existing API terms, that's not "Waging warfare".

They also stipulated that Microsoft's app be an HTML5 app, and not a native app (which is what the iOS/Android clients are), for no reason I was able to discern or theorize at the time. And thanks to deficiencies in the Windows Phone web engine, that proved impossible to do effectively.

They also refused to provide whatever information was necessary to allow their native app to display ads appropriately.

Basically, regardless of how Google explains their position, it really feels like their goal here was to prevent YouTube from being easily/effectively accessible on Windows Phone devices. Or at the very least, they had zero interest in getting WP owners onto YouTube.

They stipulated that the player use HTML5 so that it could show all of their ads and overlays correctly. That seems pretty reasonable.

Microsoft couldn't have just the player in HTML5 because their embedded webview can't play video -- which is where the stories of "Google wanted the whole app to be done in HTML5" came from.

IMO an embedded webview should be able to play video, or Microsoft should have been able to get something together just for youtube.

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