Threads Becomes Most Rapidly Downloaded App, Raising Twitter’s Ire
Two hours after pressing the launch button on Wednesday on Threads, Instagram’s new app for real-time, public conversations, Mark Zuckerberg posted that more than two million people had downloaded his latest creation.
That was just the beginning.
Another two hours later, five million people had downloaded Threads. By the time Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, went to bed on Wednesday night, the number of downloads had soared to 10 million. When he woke on Thursday morning, the app had been downloaded more than 30 million times, he said.
In less than a day, Threads — which is aimed as a rival to Twitter — appears to have taken the crown as the most rapidly downloaded app ever. It easily outstripped ChatGPT, the chatbot, which was downloaded one million times within its first five days, according to OpenAI, ChatGPT’s maker. And Threads is on a pace to exceed 100 million users within two months, a feat achieved only by ChatGPT, according to the analytics firm Similarweb.
Some of Twitter’s most-followed users — such as Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, Shakira and Oprah Winfrey — immediately joined Threads and began posting. The atmosphere was celebratory, with users writing welcome messages and expressing eagerness to read one another’s posts. At one point, the new app was so inundated with users that it appeared unstable.
Source: The New York Times
