Instagram passes 1 billion Android installs

Instagram has reached 1 billion app installs on the Google Play store, Android Police has noticed. 

This makes the photo sharing app the fourth Facebook-owned app to reach the milestone, after Facebook itself, WhatsApp and Messenger. 

The number does not accurately reflect the number of users, as it counts multiple app installs, but it's still a nice milestone that only a handful of apps have managed to achieve. 

A screenshot from Instagram's page on Google's Play Store shows the app has been downloaded more than 1 billion times.

IMAGE: STAN SCHROEDER, MASHABLE

To put it into perspective, consider that Android itself has had 1.4 billion users as of Sept. 2015. Instagram announced in July that it has more than 500 million monthly active users, 300 million of which use the app every day. 

The app has experienced a series of quite serious overhauls this year. In May, it got a new logo and a visual redesign that aimed to put more emphasis on the photos and videos than the app itself. In June, Instagram rolled out a new, algorithmic timeline, which shows users posts based on their interest instead of chronologically. And in August, the company launched Stories, a new, Snapchat-like feature that enables users to create temporary slideshows which disappear in a day.