asher + arden review for Instafeed ‑ Instagram Feed

Feb. 20, 2020

Piggybacking on the other review someone posted from Feb 19th, 2020. Who said "Good because it's free and it works. My only gripe is that it is not mobile responsive. If it was, this would be 5 stars." However, I'm rating it one star below that, simply because of the developer's pathetic response to that review. I actually happen to be a front-end web developer who writes HTML/CSS and has created feeds like this from scratch. I would absolutely NOT call this either "responsive" or "adaptive" (it's literally neither). All it does is scale down proportionately so that the same number of images appear on mobile as on desktop, which makes them tiny if you have any more than 2 images showing in the row. Do you remember how websites looked on phones before people started developing for mobile? You'd see the full desktop site, but you'd be zoomed way out so it fits on your tiny phone screen without having to scroll sideways. Nothing would be readable, everything was tiny. You had to pinch-to-zoom to interact with anything, see images, etc. This is exactly the same way this instagram feed functions. Setting max-width: 100%; in your CSS and height: auto; on your images is about the lamest excuse I've ever seen for "responsive". So no, it's absolutely not responsive. Does it work on mobile? Yes. It acts exactly like an old non-responsive website does. However, "does it work?" is a pretty low bar when non-responsive sites also technically meet that requirement. A better question would be "how is the user experience on mobile?" and the answer to that question would be "pretty garbage because you can't see anything". In my opinion, that doesn't count as "responsive" at all. Shopify's built in feature worked fine. Their developers just didn't want to be bothered to update their tool to use Instagram's new Graph API (which honestly would have taken one of their developers an afternoon) so instead they're passing the buck to third party developers. Now, if you want actual responsive functionality with your Instagram feed, you need to shell out more cash. It's lazy on Shopify's part, and seemingly the third party options are also pretty garbage unless you pay money. But hey, it's free I guess.