The head of Instagram admitted that some users are not seeing ads in their feeds and explained why. He also explained why there is no iPad version of the popular photo social network.

According to Chris Welch, Adam Mosely, who is in charge of Instagram at Facebook after serving as head of Facebook's News Feed, answered users' questions over the weekend. One of the questions was, "I don't see any ads on Instagram. Not a single ad. Is this normal?"

Mosely replied that this is perfectly normal. Apparently, there are a few users who do not see any ads at all "to understand their effectiveness." Welch asked himself if he could imagine what it would be like and replied, "Bliss."

I was one such user, and indeed, it was bliss. In fact, for a year or so, I thought it was a fluke because I had never heard of another user who did not see ads in their feed. When the ads started showing up, I thought they had finally "fixed" the problem. Now it appears that some people have been randomly selected to join this control group.

Welch also reported on another one of Mosseri's responses in that "Ask Me Anything" session. Asked about the possibility of an iPad version of Instagram, he said, "We want to make an iPad app. But we only have so many people and so much work to do.

This explanation doesn't quite ring true: there is already a code base for an iOS app, so it wouldn't take much for a few developers to rebuild the user experience and get an iPad app running quickly. It's not rocket science. And as someone pointed out in the Twitter thread, even Windows released an app a long time ago (which recently ended); ignoring iPad users seems more like a strategic political decision than anything else.

Instagram is also available in browsers, but some of the features of the mobile version are not present in the web client.