Have you ever, in the midst of using the Facebook app on Android, encountered a toast notification (those small notifications that pop up near the bottom of your device’s display) alerting you that the comment you had just posted on a friend’s status update would appear when you’re online? That happens to me quite a lot. More so when I am travelling across the country and in between places with spotty network access.
You will soon be seeing the same on Instagram’s Android application if you happen to be a user of Facebook’s popular image sharing social network.
The motivation behind this, according to Hendri, the Facebook software engineer who demoed it at the ongoing Facebook Developer Conference (F8), is the growing number of Instagram users based in developing markets where most of the time the quality of network connections is not assured. In fact, according to Hendri, over 80% of Instagram’s 600 million monthly active users reside outside the United States and as such, there is a need for an Instagram offline mode.
The result is the rollout of the offline feature, which lets users like photos, follow/unfollow other users and comment on pictures even in the absence of a data connection, in the beta version of the Instagram Android application.
Here’s how you can become an Instagram for Android guinea pig beta tester.
The feature is expected to roll out to all users of Instagram’s Android app once the Instagram team at Facebook is done testing.
