Instagram degrades picture quality?

[max1]

I know it degrades... but to compare 2 pics taken from my friend's Iphone and a samsung galaxy note of mine, why does mine degrades much worse?! You could literally see the pixels and it is not sharp at all. Where else, the pic uploaded and taken from an iphone is way less pixelated.

Im pretty sure it's not about the phone's cam quality. Cuz i compared both of the ori pics and galaxy note's pic has way better quality


any tips on how i can overcome this problem?

is it better to snap the pic from the app, or directly from your phone's camera?

[A]

When you take an image without the app, and you later upload with the instagram app, it makes you do the square crop. How severe you crop it will determine the "quality ". If you use the instagram camera, then you don't have to crop it, making the image appear to have better quality. Though on the downside you can't really control the settings with the instagram app, so the image turns out not as well when you can control the iso/white balance all that stuff.