Instagram launched in October 2010 and ever since then iOS (and now Android) users have been signing up to the photo-sharing service in their millions.

From the day it launched, its detractors have complained about the fact the app ‘ruins’ photos, squashing down the image and making it all ‘grainy’. 

This comment on Gawker drives that point home:

I fucking hate Instagram. All those potentially beautiful photos intentionally made to look vintage or distressed for no other reason than… well, I honestly don’t know the reason. I just have to wonder if all those Mom’s I see incessantly posting Ingarammy photos of their kids are going to one day regret that the vast majority of those photos look like shit once the novelty wears off.

Given that Instagram creates a copy of the photo and leaves the original, I’m not sure how this argument continues to stand up.

If the user deletes the original, then they may have a point. But that puts the fault in the hands of the user, not Instagram.

Instagram is all about its mobile social network, not the app. Facebook knows this and that’s why it was prepared to pay $1 billion for it.

Discoverability is a problem for any application marketplace, especially when you have more than 300,000 apps available to users subscribing to your mobile ecosystem.

Apple is possibly looking to do something about it, after it acquired Chomp, but the search function on Google Play is so poor, one of the biggest apps to hit the platform in recent years is being passed over because Android users can’t find it.

As you may be already be aware, Instagram finally launched on Android today, after amassing over 30 million users on iOS alone (that’s pretty damn amazing).

However, if you are interested in grabbing a copy of the app and try to search for the app on the Google Play website, these are the following results:

In fact, it doesn’t even register on the first page of the results. It’s the same on the Play Store on Android devices.

For an app that has probably been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times already, it’s inexcusable that Google’s algorithms — or even an editor — haven’t ensured that the results are relevant and actually match the term when it is entered.

Google’s speciality is search, so why is this happening?

One argument could be that whilst Android users waiting for the Instagram team to bestow them with an app, scammers and third-party developers flooded the market with fake Instagram apps, rendering the search ineffective.

Even so, it’s been more than an hour (maybe two) and it still isn’t showing.

Apple’s App Store suffers when an app first goes live, as it proflierates across regional stores, but that is usually fixed within the hour.

Right now, Google is relying on blogs, Twitter and Facebook to refer users to the Instagram app. Take a look at the first three results for ‘Instagram Google Play search’:

This is Google’s bread and butter, it defies logic that this is happening.

Sounds like another round of the ‘Android phone or condom?’ name game but it’s the name of the iPad stylus that I purchased today.

I had talked about choosing one of three iPad styli, each one with their own advantages. The Wacom Bamboo stylus had a decent reputation, the Trixis HQ had price on its side but the Cosmonaut pipped them both in the end.

‘Why?’ You might ask.

Well, not only is the Cosmonaut a sturdy, well packaged stylus, it was also the subject of some glorious feedback when I discussed my potential purchase on Twitter. Studio Neat also did a fantastic job of advertising its plus points in the below video:

Ultimately, it was the discount code I stumbled across that sealed the deal. I came across a $5 code via a Twitter search and made the purchase.

Completing the checkout process, I shared the code ‘5by5’ on Twitter. Within two hours, three Twitter acquaintances bought the Cosmonaut.

Did you know the stylus originally started off as a Kickstarter project? I didn’t. It just shows how popular the tablet accessory has become.