Making Threads for iOS
summary
Built on top of the Instagram codebase and shipped in 150 days, Threads for iOS reuses core views, uses IGListKit for feeds and Buck for builds, and moves most new code to Swift (about 30% of Meta’s Swift lived in the codebase at launch). Major engineering work creates a container wrapper to allow reposts and replies to reference the same IG media, implements per-cell profile-picture rendering to draw threadlines, and survives iOS 17 crashes to reach 100 million in less than 5 days.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Threads iOS development intro
- 1:28Building on Instagram’s foundation
- 3:13Speed vs technical debt
- 6:02Swift vs Objective-C
- 7:26IG List Kit for Threads
- 8:51Early design challenges
- 10:57Reposts and replies solution
- 11:59Onboarding and launch strategy
- 13:41Record launch and growth
- 14:46Post-launch improvements
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