Update 1 June 2016: Instagram API changes went into effect. Retro is no longer working. You should see a message explaining the shut down in the app.

Today Instagram announces a big update to its policy regarding 3rd party apps. With these new changes, Instagram will only allow some types of app to continue using Instagram API:

We’ve updated our Platform Policy to explicitly list the use cases we will support moving forward. These include apps and services that:

  • Help individuals share their own content with 3rd party apps, such as apps that let you print your photos and import an Instagram photo as a profile picture.

  • Help brands and advertisers understand and manage their audience, develop their content strategy, and get digital rights to media. Established apps in this space may apply for our newly announced Instagram Partner Program.

  • Help broadcasters and publishers discover content, get digital rights to media, and share media using web embeds.

Retro, unfortunately, doesn’t fit into any categories above. Furthermore, Instagram will deprecate the home feed API endpoint (/users/self/feed) on June 1st 2016. This effectively kills the most important feature for Retro and all 3rd party clients out there.

With these changes, we could not justify working on new updates for Retro, so we will leave the app as it is on the App Store until it stops working, probably on June 1st 2016.

We get where Instagram is coming from on this, 3rd party apps have never been a priority on the platform. Instagram is also ramping up its advertisement, which is not displayed on any 3rd party apps (but we’re only accounting for a fraction of its users anyway). We’d like to think that they have an iPad app ready to go on June 1st 2016, because otherwise we’ll stop using Instagram on our iPads (the iPhone app is not an alternative for us, that’s the reason we made Retro in the first place). This sucks for us and it sucks for users of 3rd party clients out there.

We started working on Retro 2 years ago with one simple goal: to make browsing Instagram on iPad sucks less. We’d like to think that we have helped hundred of thousands of users who downloaded our app accomplished that. To all of our users, especially those who purchase the premium upgrades, THANK YOU. We’re incredibly proud of the work we have done on Retro. We got featured a couple times on the App Store around the globe, but nothing beats the feeling of having your app install on the demo iPads at Apple Store. This is the end for Retro but Tiny Whale will continue to deliver new and creative apps for years to come.

Follow @tinywhaleinc on Twitter for update on our future projects.