Apple’s Phil Schiller Unhappy With Instagram’s Expansion, Believes App “Jumped The Shark When It Went To Android”

by Roy Alugbue on Apr 20th 2012, 8:06am
tagged Android, apple, feud, instagram

Instagram’s release for Android generated an enormous amount of enthusiasm, but also significant angst among iPhone users. Apparently among the people who were unhappy about Instagram’s recent expansion was Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller. 9to5Mac reported one of its readers reached out to Schiller after noticing that his Instagram account, under the name @schiller, had vanished suddenly. Schiller responded directly to the reader through Twitter highlighting Instagram “jumped the shark when it went to Android”. Ouch.

Oh there’s more too. Another 9to5Mac reader named Clayton Braasch asked Schiller to elaborate on his statement. Braasch shares in a post on his blog Schiller’s response. Schiller contends that Instagram is still a “great app and community”, but liked the fact it was limited to a small and select group of early adopters. Since the growth and expansion of Instagram, Schiller believes “the signal to noise ratio is different”. Looks like he would have rather seen all of those Instagram alternatives for Android users instead of Instagram being available for Android.

Thoughts?

source: 9to5Mac
via: The Verge

» See more articles by Roy Alugbue

Categorized as Android Applications, Android News, Android Software

http://www.facebook.com/abetsi Albert Rabuyo

Haters gonna hate.
dretzle

I don’t see his comment as a bash against Android. In the time when everyone should be jealous of the iPhone, looks like Apple Senior VPs are actually jealous of Android.
Nat Caruso

Iphone market share is down and all these apple fanboys and apple itself are jealous of Androids success.
Adam

Why are Apple/iphone people elitist - its just a phone for crying out loud!
Dave Isherwood

Are Apple calling themselves a ‘shark’? If so what a poor choice of words considering what the dictionary definition is and no I’m not talking species of fish…

‘a person who unscrupulously exploits or swindles others’, then again this is quite a good assessment of Apple. LoL
Rccerrillo

What a putz!
Tom

Snob!
http://twitter.com/senote andrew senote

If apple wanted to keep instagram exclusive they should have bought it. Schiller needs to grow up, man up and stop whining like a bitch.
Richard.bown

This is nothing more than snobbery, just because instragram has had massive cross platform success the “community” have got all elitist. It’s different when they want to shift their own units isn’t it?
JZ

In this article, we catch a glimpse of the thinking of an Apple exec. They have built their ecosystem and now they sell it. But Apple is not trying to get everyone to use their products. Otherwise, it would lose that clubby feel. Imagine if all Android users suddenly started using an exact copy of iOS on their Android phones because the folks at XDA figured out a way to port it, etc, for example. This VP and other iSheep might whine and complain and want to jump ship from iOS itself (!), since it’s not “exclusive” any longer. Reminds me of what a friend of mine said about 25 years ago: “I was a fan of U2 before they were cool.” See that? He has low self-esteem and finds an ego-boost by making sure that I know he’s “cooler” than the rest of the late-to-the-party pack of neo U2 fans, circa 1988. Ever wonder why Apple bans Android Navigation from their user base? The want to control what their people do and they would rather make their users wait years until they develop their own version. Can’t they let their users have great apps, even if they didn’t come from Apple? Google is so opposite with their desire to make the world’s information accessible.
M PITA

wikipedia: “The usage of “jump the shark” has subsequently broadened beyond television, indicating the moment in its evolution when a brand, design, or creative effort moves beyond the essential qualities that initially defined its success, beyond relevance or recovery.” Geez, just because instagram released an android version? Really?
Looks like Phil never got over finding out his girlfriend was bangin all his fiends…
Curt

Phil is just getting as snobbish as the rest of the Apple execs. First they want to sue everyones pants off before they ‘copied’ iOS design, and now they want to control the apps that Android gets. I predict that Apple will sue instragram developers because they had some form of ‘exclusive contract’ that stated that only Apple is allowed to have instragram……

Yes, this is as bad as Apple suing Android Handset manufacturer’s over ‘gestures’
http://www.zoomis.com/ Daman Bahner

I can see a little elitism in there, but if anyone deserves to be upset, it’s Apple execs. This is really no different than PS3 trying to keep an exclusive game from an XBox port. Let’s say you’re in the market for a new smartphone and are one of the percentage that’s undecided. There could potentially be two or three key apps that are exclusive to one platform that sway the decision. Apple just lost a BIG exclusive. Imagine where they’d be right now had they not bought Soundjam and rebranded to iTunes. iTunes is of course the exclusive they cannot afford to lose.
Curt

If they wanted to keep it exclusive, they should have bought them out. They don’t ‘deserve’ to be upset because it was exclusive to Apple, but now it is also on Android. If they want more customers, build a better phone, give people choices (not just RAM, but screen size, processor speeds etc). Quit spending so much time/money on frivolous lawsuits and get back to trying to be ahead of the curve in innovation. They lost the lead because they were too focused on courts instead of R&D. They were too focused on trying to milk the gravy train with incremental updates to the hardware, instead of making large updates to the hardware that they were known for. If you don’t believe this, then go back to look at the past 2 years, and see which manufacturer’s did what with their hardware and you will see that all other smartphone manufacturer’s made big strides in hardware, but Apple did not.

I am not an Apple hater, I like Apple products. I used to be an Apple Certified Technician back when I was working in a retail computer service environment, when the biggest advances were the increase in speed of the processor. I watched Apple almost die out, when Microsoft saved them buy giving them millions of dollars for access to the System 7 API’s so they could make Office work faster/better on a Mac. I remember the iMac came out and it was a big hit. Today there is not a laptop/laptop dock combination as good as the DUO Powerbook which was way ahead of its time. I even owned a Newton personally, and while the Handwriting recognition was better than anything else, it was a little too bulky. I switched to Palm when I won a Palm V in a contest and saw how small each of the applications were and how huge each application was on the Newton. Never heard anything from them about how the Palm was a ripoff of their Newton design back then. We never heard a peep from Apple about how Windows 95 was a ripoff of their OS interface design when it came out.

But yeah… when Apple is like this, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.