14 DAY TRIAL // Owners of Windows Phone devices who are using the Instance application to upload photos to Instagram have their images deleted shortly after they are initially listed on the service, it seems.
Instance, one of the most popular third-party Instagram clients for the Windows Phone operating system, has had issues with the service before, and its developer had to change the app’s name from Itsdagram, but it seems that these problems continue.
In fact, the software’s developer himself, Daniel Gary, took to Twitter to signal the issue: “Evidently Instagram has little spies that watch every Windows Phone user and deletes their images after uploading.”
According to a recent article on The Verge, things are indeed this way, and photos that have been uploaded from a Windows Phone handset using this specific application disappear from the user’s page within a few moments after appearing there.
Furthermore, links through which such photos could be shared with others no longer appear to work, although the users themselves can still see the images on their accounts.
This suggests that Instagram is indeed tracking photos that have been uploaded using third-party clients such as Instance, and that it is actively deleting the content.
According to the developer, however, a fix for this might be coming, especially given that the issue is affecting all those who use said application to upload photos to Instagram.
“It’s their servers, their service. What I was doing was not approved by them and was using their private API,” he also said.
However, other Windows Phone clients that provide Instagram uploading capabilities appear to continue working just fine, though it’s unclear whether the service will try to block them as well.
Interestingly though, Instagram (or Facebook, the service’s parent company) hasn’t released an official mobile client for Microsoft’s platform as of yet, and hasn’t confirmed plans to do so either, despite Nokia’s efforts to determine it to build such an application.