Threads has achieved more than 150 million downloads in just a week—reaching one-fifth of Twitter’s weekly active user base in the process.
The app has been an overnight success for parent Meta, who saw an opportunity in the wake of Twitter’s newly Musk-induced floundering. These app insights provided by data.ai reveal that Threads has gained massive early traction despite not having core features like hashtags at launch.
While the growth has been tremendous for Threads, it seems as though the curiosity is waning. App analytics firm Sensor Tower reports that Threads’ daily active users have declined around 20% from its launch. Time spent on the app is also down 50% from 20 minutes to just 10 minutes. Despite the drop, the curiosity about a potential Twitter alternative highlights just how unstable the Twitter platform has become for anyone engaging in brand promotion.
Perhaps surprisingly, the leading country interested in Threads is not the United States, but India—where TikTok was banned. India accounted for 33% of those 150 million total downloads in the first week. Brazil (22%) is next, followed by the United States (16%), and Mexico (8%), and Japan (5%). Curious about the absence of any European countries on that list? That’s because Threads isn’t available in the EU due to data privacy regulations—and Meta is actively keeping Europeans out with VPNs.
European users complained about not being able to access the Threads app through VPN, and Meta confirmed this is intentional. “Threads is not currently available in most countries in Europe, and we’ve taken additional steps to prevent people based there from accessing it at this time,” reads a press statement from the company. “Europe continues to be an incredibly important market for Meta and we hope to make Threads available here in the future.”
Because the Threads app has extensive data tracking that includes a range of personal (health, financial, location, browsing history, contacts, and search history) it cannot legally be released in the EU. The Digital Markets Act gate keeps how tech giants like Meta can combine this harvested information for ad targeting purposes.
