// the take
A TypeScript React Native clone of Instagram's UI and core social features, built on RN 0.62 with Firebase as the backend and Redux/Redux-thunk for state. It's for developers studying how to structure a large RN app with real-world feature breadth (stories, DMs, comments, settings), not for anyone building a product on it.
Feature coverage is unusually wide for a clone project: stories with highlights, direct messages with image/location sharing, nested comment replies, notification feeds, and a full settings tree matching Instagram's actual menu depth. Code is split into sensible actions/reducers/components/screens folders, so the Redux data flow is easy to trace. TypeScript is used consistently rather than bolted on as an afterthought.
Last pushed mid-2022 on React Native 0.62, which predates the new architecture (Fabric/TurboModules) entirely and will fight current RN/Firebase SDK versions on a fresh install. The post-upload flow depends on a separate self-hosted image classification API with a hardcoded private IP in the config, so core functionality is broken until you stand up and point at your own server. There's no Firebase security rules or schema documentation included, so the backend half of the app is a black box you'd have to reverse-engineer from client calls. The only test file is the default RN boilerplate test, so there's zero real test coverage despite the app's size.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →