If they give their data to other people, people will complain. If they don't people will complain. It seems like no matter what they do someone will be mad.
There have been some third party services [1] that allow a data dump of your Instagram photos... which probably just lost their functionality in the API deprecation.
(Though I think they were really _just_ the photos without the other data like your stories, drafts, comments, followers and followings graph, etc.)
Perhaps locking it down puts pressure on IG to provide an official solution since others can't.
Or... one could write some code to run a headless browser and scrape everything that can be loaded on desktop.
That's fair from their perspective. Frustrating from a competitive standpoint: the most common reason for a user's "Why wouldn't I just use Facebook for that [instead of some new product]?" seems to be that all their data / friend graph is already on FB.
Does anyone know of any kind of community effort to democratize social data? e.g. ideal product: API-ified dashboard where I can view all my FB friends, IG followers, Twitter followers as well as every single piece of content (tweets, photos, etc) that I have permission to view on each respective platform. Standardized in a public format, live updated, and consumable by other apps (if permitted by those apps' users).
Super technically challenging (given that much of this data would be inaccessible without well-maintained brittle web scraping bots), but seems technically possible.
But I guess such an effort could run into the same scrutiny as the reasons IG shut down these endpoints... :\
However, make it somewhat difficult/scary to do this, so that a personality quiz app won't be able to successfully trick you into agreeing to it.