Challenging times for Instagram developer community ?

2 min readJun 3, 2020

A few days back I came across a great github repository, which used Instagram API for accessing data, I cloned the repository and followed the Read me file. The prerequisites of this amazing project was Instagram user’s id number (e.g - 515151845), access token (e.g - Awrfdsf09dnve……) and slack incoming website hook.

So to fulfill these perquisites, I went on to Instagram developer platform and that is where I read this:

So, Why Instagram is disabling the Instagram Legacy API ?

The legacy Instagram API has been around prior to the Facebook acquisition. If you were using a third party Instagram insights service, it is likely that you have already experienced service disruption. Facebook has told all developers that they need to transition their applications to a new API.

The entire process of shutting down the Instagram Legacy API started in January ,2018 when Instagram publicly announced their plans to shut down the Instagram Legacy API platform through a sequenced approach. They plan to disable the final permission remaining on the Legacy API (“Basic Permission”) on June 29, 2020 and any existing apps using the Legacy API will no longer have access.

So, Will your application not be able to access the Instagram API after 29th June 2020?

No it won’t, but to keep your application running you can access the API by migrating to the Instagram Graph API and the Instagram Basic Display API without delay so that users of your app have time to transition as well. Both APIs rely on permissions that require App Review, which can take a week or longer to complete, so you should begin the process as soon as you can to avoid any interruption in service.

Here are some resources that helped me:-

Thanks for reading.

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Challenging times for Instagram developer community ?

Written by Rishikesh Mishra