Instagram Threads' usage on Android falls 79% after a month

Instagram's Threads app has lost 79 per cent of its daily active users on Android, as Elon Musk-owned X's usage keeps growing amid his cage fight drama with Meta Founder Mark Zuckerberg, according to latest data.

The Threads Android app peaked at 49.3 million daily active users worldwide on July 7, according to estimates by analytics firm Similarweb.

However, on August 7, the app was down to 10.3 million daily active users.

The average amount of time daily active users spent with the Threads app started out at about 14 minutes worldwide, but was significantly higher in the US -- nearly 21 minutes on July 7. By August 7, that was down to just 3 minutes.

“For comparison, X (formerly Twitter) has more than 100 million daily active users on Android alone, and they consistently spend about 25 minutes per day on it,” the data showed.

The initial rush of excitement did not last long for Threads, the Meta Platform's answer to the app formerly known as Twitter.

Threads had a huge launch at the beginning of July, fuelled by the near-instant onboarding of Instagram users to the new text-based social app.

“However, the boom in active users of Threads didn’t last. The app’s active user count boomed in the first couple of days when new users were busy checking out the app and seeing who else was on it, but that faded fast,” Similarweb noted.

In the US, peak usage for Threads was 2.3 million daily active users on July 7, compared with about 576,000 as of August 7.

In the US, Threads captured nearly as much active user time as X (formerly Twitter) at launch but has since fallen far behind, the report mentioned.

Threads is also missing much of the intriguing content that keeps X (Twitter) users coming back -- if only to read and comment on each other’s posts critical of X owner Elon Musk.

“Threads may still have a better chance of becoming ‘the new Twitter’ than some other alternatives, but it needs to provide its users with more reasons to keep coming back,” the report said.