Just last week Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg engaged in a playful banter about a hypothetical cage fight and this time around it’s not anything physical but it’s going to be a real fight between apps after several months of rumors, so it’s not really shocking. Meta has thrown the hat in the ring with Instagram Threads, apparently Twitter’s competitor, and is expected to launch on Thursday, 6 July, according to the App Store listing for the app showing a version ready for Apple’s iPhone.
This follows an Android listing for Threads, an Instagram app, that briefly showed up on Google Play on Saturday with similar screenshots and some initial details. Another listing I saw that’s still live on Google Play doesn’t have a release date, so this App Store page may give us the official date for Threads to launch.
Here is the official — and brief — description of the app, from the App Store:
Say more with Threads — Instagram’s text-based conversation app.
Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.
It being a Meta app, Threads will also hoover up data on your phone, including location data, purchases, and browsing history. Several apps that bear a striking resemblance to Twitter have sprung up in recent years – such as Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Mastodon. Another similar app, Bluesky claimed to have seen “record” traffic after Mr Musk’s move to restrict usage at the weekend.
However, Threads could be the biggest threat faced by Twitter to date. Mark Zuckerberg has a history of borrowing other company’s ideas and making them work. Meta’s Reels is widely seen as a TikTok copy, while Stories looks similar to Snapchat. Meta has the resources to compete with Twitter. Threads will be part of the Instagram platform, which will also be connected to hundreds of millions of accounts. It’s not starting from zero, as other would-be rivals have had to do.
Another thing to note is that just because the app is available to download on July 6th doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to jump in and post. I wouldn’t be surprised if Meta does a slow rollout of some kind for the app, so you might want to be prepared to wait to actually be able to find your new non-Twitter home.
But I can understand if you’re actively seeking a new place to post. Twitter has blocked unregistered users from being able to see tweets and implemented rate limits for those who are logged in that could block you after reading hundreds or thousands of posts in a day.
The company is also suddenly rolling out major changes to TweetDeck, a tool used by many journalists and social media professionals, shortly after the app began to break, supposedly under the strain of scrapers trawling for data to feed AI models. And in about a month, TweetDeck is scheduled to become a paid feature.
Many Twitter users tried to turn to Bluesky over the holiday weekend, but that service halted new user signups for more than a day to fix issues it ran into because of the waves of people flooding the app. The CEO of Mastodon says he is feeling good, though.
