“the best feature is that it works” explains systrom. “you compare our history to other social media startups and it’s been very good. we’ve been very careful about scaling.”

and to that end the team has spent much of the last year planning for growth. because they don’t want to revamp the system while its under load, that’s meant doing things like calculating where likes-per-second will be in a month—or six months—and reconfiguring the app and back end to support it. there is no gail ehale or tumblrbeast of instagram. there’s just uptime. and they want to keep it that way, even as they continue to blow up.

…

“the only thing that will make other platforms happen is natural growth of the team. i think we didn’t expect how quickly we’d grow a year ago when we were like ‘oh let’s work on android next.’ everything became a priority, and because everything became a priority we had to focus on what was most important which was to keep the site going and make users really happy. a person is a person is a person no matter what phone you own. i’m excited to be on android someday. are you kidding me? our growth is going to double.” and as to those rumors that instagram is going to develop an app for Windows phone before android, leap-frogging the most popular mobile platform in the world? “we’re evaluating all different platforms all the time, but android is very much our obvious next step,” he says.

- inside instagram: how slowing it’s roll put the little startup in the fast lane | via gizmodo