Shubham Sawarkar
Instagram‘s Threads, the new text-based social media app launched by Meta, has taken the world by storm. Within days of its release, it amassed a staggering 100 million users, showcasing its incredible growth potential. Recent data from app intelligence firm data.ai sheds light on the app’s remarkable success, revealing that Threads already boasts one-fifth of Twitter’s weekly active user base worldwide. In addition, it outshines its largest U.S. Twitter rival, Truth Social, with 86 times more weekly active users.
While Threads experienced a slight dip in early usage, a recent analysis by Sensor Tower, another app intelligence firm, identified a decline in daily active users and time spent on the app, CNBC reported. However, data.ai suggests that this decline in momentum is only temporary, as Threads has achieved over 150 million downloads, making it 5.5 times faster in achieving this milestone than Niantic’s Pokémon Go, a previous record-holder since its debut in July 2016.
The firm has uncovered additional insights regarding Threads’ audience composition. During its first partial week of availability, the app attracted approximately 93 million active users globally. This figure surpasses the official announcement of 100 million signups made by Threads on July 10. Surprisingly, India emerged as the leading country in terms of app downloads, accounting for 33% of the global share. Following closely behind is Brazil (22%), the United States (16%), and, finally, Mexico and Japan at 8% and 5%, respectively. Unfortunately, regulatory hurdles and privacy concerns have prevented Threads’ availability in the European Union, with Meta taking measures to block EU users’ access to the app through VPNs.
Threads recently released its first significant update since its launch, introducing support for iOS 17 as a public beta, among other minor improvements. Promising enhancements are still in the pipeline, including the introduction of a following feed, an edit button, multi-account support, and integration with ActivityPub—a protocol powering the decentralized Twitter alternative, Mastodon.
