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Meta’s recent efforts to expand Threads’ installed base are paying off. Instagram threads are outpacing X (formerly Twitter), at least when it comes to new downloads, according to a new analysis of app store trends. App intelligence firm Apptopia reports that Threads’ daily download numbers had been declining since September, but here he shows that the situation has changed in the opposite direction in just over a week. Specifically, since Thursday, November 23rd, the number of daily downloads has increased to 620,000 from about 350,000 in early November and about 1 million in early September.
The company estimates that Threads’ recent spike is likely due to Meta running ads for new apps designed to provide an alternative to Twitter, but not in terms of new app downloads. , still outperforms Threads compared to X.
Since September, X has had 27 million new downloads, compared to 41 million for Threads, the company reported. These metrics also include downloads of Company X’s emerging market app Twitter Lite. Twitter Lite has not yet been renamed to X, but additional installs may be increasing as app store users are looking for the app under its former name, “Twitter.”
Additionally, Threads’ momentum is coming from outside the US According to the data, the biggest driver of new downloads for Threads is India, accounting for 11.2% of new downloads or 9.2 million. The United States came in second with 7.4% of downloads, or 6.1 million. This trend may not come as a surprise since India has been the biggest growth driver for Instagram itself, according to Apptopia.
Meanwhile, the biggest source of new downloads of X is also not the US, but Indonesia, followed by India. However, the company found that across the US, Indonesia, and India, there were fewer new downloads of X than were added to Threads in India alone.
Apptopia suggests that the drop in new downloads of X is due to the app, now called X, losing significant growth momentum due to the rebranding. In fact, in late September, X added the words “formerly Twitter” to his App Store description to improve the app’s ranking in searches for the keyword “Twitter.” The move followed a drop in weekly active user numbers and rankings following the rebrand, as app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower reported at the time. As a result, it was found that the app “Twitter Lite” was increasing in ranking even though the ranking of X was decreasing. This is likely because the user was trying to download an app known as Twitter. This led to a spike in Twitter Lite installs, which Sensor Tower said increased by about 350% in the first week after the rebrand.
But now even those wrong installs aren’t helping X in terms of total new installs when compared to threads.
Still, X is still a bigger platform than Threads and has remained fairly sticky, preventing many older users from leaving for the new platform entirely. X has over 500 million monthly active users, while Threads reports just under 100 million as of Meta’s latest earnings in October. But for an app that was only three months old at the time, it’s a big step forward. According to Quiver Quantitative’s independent tracker, Threads’ user count has increased to 141 million as of November 10th.
Now, Apple, IBM, Disney, Paramount, Comcast/NBCU, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, Sony, and most recently Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media and Walmart have pulled their campaigns from the platform. This is what X owner Elon Musk said in an interview at the New York Times Deal Book Conference on November 29th, in response to brands that left the platform over his own anti-Semitic posts. This happened after he said, “Fuck yourself.”
Despite these issues, X still proves to be a place where news breaks regularly, as seen in the OpenAI boardroom drama that took place before Thanksgiving in the US. There is. On social media platforms, many of the major activities were posted to X, including new announcements and messages to his OpenAI team. This is because X is still his main platform for many news announcements and Instagram head Adam Mosseri said his Threads will not be doing so. It aims to not amplify news and become a less real-time competitor to X. Last week, Mosseri added that Threads’ search results are also not chronological, creating a “substantive security loophole” for spammers to access. Bad actors game the results by adding relevant words and tags.