The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved indinavir March 13, 1996, making it the eighth approved antiretroviral. Indinavir was much more powerful than any prior antiretroviral drug; using it with dual NRTIs set the standard for treatment of HIV/AIDS and raised the bar on design and introduction of subsequent antiretroviral drugs. Protease inhibitors changed the very nature of the AIDS epidemic from one of a terminal illness to a somewhat manageable one.

Increasingly, it is being replaced by newer drugs that are more convenient to take and less likely to promote resistant virus, such as lopinavir or atazanavir.

Unfortunately, indinavir wears off quickly after dosing and therefore requires dosing very precisely every eight hours in order to thwart HIV from forming drug resistant mutations including resistances to other protease inhibitors. It has restrictions on what sorts of food may be eaten concurrently.