Flume is constantly being improved and developed to support Instagram's latest features and changes. This is a on-going effort which will always mean that some features are missing in Flume that you can perform on the mobile Instagram apps. This also means that existing features can also stop working at any point in time, until they are manually updated to remain compatible with the latest changes Instagram makes.
When new features are added to the Instagram apps, it takes time for them to be added to Flume for Mac for the following reasons:
- Flume is developed, maintained, and supported by just one person, as opposed to the thousands of engineers that work at Facebook and the dedicated Instagram team. Customer support, marketing, and all other non-development related tasks can also result in delays to development.
- Features that Instagram develops and tests internally are not known prior to their public release. Instagram may have spent months or years developing certain features.
- Instagram secures their applications and network. In certain cases, security and technical implementations by Instagram/Facebook mean it takes time to make Flume compatible, or requires additional security and technical expertise to implement.
- Flume is developed without any inside knowledge of Facebook and Instagram's technologies and implementations, meaning lots of additional testing and discovery is required to understand how a feature has been implemented.
- Flume's development and release cycle can never align with that of Instagram's.
- Some features are developed using proprietary methods that cannot be re-developed easily, reliably, or securely.
- macOS development takes longer than iOS or Android development, and there are many more factors to consider including varying input devices, network configurations, photo and video formats.
When a new feature makes its way to Instagram, it will be assessed if it can be added to Flume in a later update.