Threads is still gaining ground with users and could be on its way to becoming bigger than X.
Meta’s newest app, launched last summer on the back of Instagram’s tech, has seen daily active users grow consistently since November, according to usage estimates from Apptopia. Threads is a direct rival of X, formerly Twitter, which has struggled to maintain its user base since Elon Musk acquired the platform about 18 months ago.
Now, Threads has more daily users in the US than X, a trend that’s been ongoing since December, when Threads became Apple’s most downloaded app.
“Threads DAUs in the US passed X in December 2023 and it has not looked back,” Thomas Grant, Apptopia’s VP of research, said. It’s currently the third most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store, while X is in 41st place. In the Google Play Store, Threads is in 12th place among free apps, while X is in 44th place.
So far in April, Threads has averaged an estimated 28 million daily active users, so people who have opened the app at least once in a 24-hour period. That’s a roughly 55% increase in DAUs from December when Threads averaged an estimated 18 million users each day.
DAUs in the US have been choppier on X, and fewer than Threads overall during the same time period. In April so far, X has averaged 22 million DAUs, a usage rate that’s 21% lower than Threads. DAUs on X have been relatively flat for the last three months but are up since December when the platform saw 17 million DAUs. That was the first month Threads beat X on DAUs in the US.
Users of X remain down overall compared to before Musk took over the platform. According to Sensor Tower estimates, daily users of the X app worldwide are down 19% compared to October 2022, the month that Musk took over Twitter. X DAUs worldwide for the first quarter of 2024 are down 14% year-over-year.
Still, Threads has work to do to unseat X as the most popular microblogging app and hit Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s goal of getting to 1 billion users on the platform. And promotional work with Taylor Swift may not be the way to go about it.
Last week, when Swift used Threads for the first time to promote her latest album, receiving several bespoke features to do so, Threads gained “no noticeable lift” in users, according to Sensor Tower. An estimate of daily users from Apptopia for the week also shows no gain in Threads users.
X’s monthly active users in the US handily beat Threads. According to Apptopia estimates, Threads US MAUs have been around 100 million for the last three months, although Zuckerberg in February said total MAUs were closer to 130 million. Either way, X MAUs are just over 140 million in the US alone, although users have fluctuated over the last year between 135 million MAUs and the current 140 million.
Nevertheless, Zuckerberg seems bullish on Threads and has spoken highly of it in every quarterly earnings call since its launch, saying in February it’s “on track to be a major success.”
“I’m optimistic we can keep the pace of improvements and growth going, and show that a friendly discussion-oriented app can be as widely used as the most popular social apps,” Zuckerberg added.
Meta reports first quarter results on Wednesday.
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