Data tracking websites said on Monday that the Threads app, which Instagram released as a competitor to Twitter, has racked up more than 100 million users in less than five days, shattering the previous record-holder for the fastest-growing consumer app, ChatGPT, an AI tool.
Instagram itself took two and a half years to achieve that threshold following its 2010 inception, while ChatGPT took two months and the video-sharing service TikTok took nine months.
On Wednesday and Thursday, Threads went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 different countries, but it is not yet available in Europe since parent company Meta is unsure how to deal with the data protection laws in the European Union.
Twitter is estimated to have 200 million daily users, but since Tesla mogul Elon Musk purchased the network last year and fired hundreds of employees, it has experienced numerous technological problems.
By charging for previously free services and re-allowing right-wing accounts on the platform, Musk—who is also the CEO of SpaceX—has offended a lot of people.
A number of competitors have developed, although the most are specialized systems unable to surpass Twitter in size.
Due to its connection to Instagram, which has more than a billion regular users, Threads is finding it to be simpler.
‘Good policy’ At 7:00 GMT on Monday, online data provider Quiver Quantitative claimed that the app had reached 100 million users.
Other websites that used a count of the “badges” that Instagram users who downloaded Threads got concluded that the milestone had already been reached.
But Meta is having a lot of trouble with Europe’s data protection laws.
For violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the company already faces recurring fines.
Now, companies like Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, are expressly prohibited from pooling data across their platforms by the upcoming Digital Markets Act.
Because Threads accounts are connected to Instagram accounts, its revenue strategy focuses around consuming personal information for use in targeted advertisements.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s industry commissioner, said on French radio Franceinfo that Meta was correct to strive to ensure that its apps complied with the rules in his first public response to Threads.
He stated, “Taking a little time to do so seems to me to be probably good policy,” adding that there were several options. – acrimonious rivalry Meta has refuted Musk’s accusations that it stole trade secrets and intellectual property while threatening legal action against the company. Additionally, the multibillionaire businessman and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are engaged in a close-knit and growingly childish competition.
The two men have been arguing for years, but when it became evident that Meta intended to take on Twitter, things have heated up.
The two men challenged one another to a cage match last month, and Zuckerberg tweeted for the first time in ten years when he introduced Threads.
He shared a well-known meme of two Spider-Men staring at each other, which was interpreted as a dig at how similar Threads and Twitter were.
On Monday, Musk escalated his disagreement with Zuckerberg by suggesting that the two men compete in a “literal” penis-measuring competition.