Apple Plants Roots in Threads as Users Approach 100 Million 

Apple appears to be all-in on Meta’s new text-based app Threads.

A report Sunday by 9to5Mac notes that the platform is on the brink of surpassing 100 million users four days after its launch. Among those users: a handful of Apple’s accounts.

“To my knowledge, Apple brand accounts are everywhere except Mastodon,” the website’s Zac Hall wrote. “Everywhere for Apple now includes a lot more Threads accounts than it started with three days ago.”

Apple News, Apple Books, Apple Music, Shazam and Beats by Dre are all among the Apple-related businesses signing up for the platform.

The significance, Hall wrote, is that it demonstrates Apple’s commitment to the Twitter rival, particularly since the tech giant hasn’t lent similar support to Mastodon, another Twitter competitor. It also shows how mainstream Threads has become.

The report cites figures from Quiver Quantitative, which showed Threads with 98 million users as of 5:30 p.m. Sunday. Threads debuted last week, built by Meta’s Instagram teams, and offering a space for users to share posts of up to 500 characters with links, as well as photos and videos up to five minutes long.

“Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas,” Meta said in its announcement.

However, the app is not being offered in the European Union, because of uncertainty around the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and data privacy concerns.

Graham Doyle, deputy commissioner of Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), said that Meta “informed us that they have no plans” to launch the app in the EU “at present,” Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that he hopes to see Threads surpass Twitter’s 300 million-plus user count. 

“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it,” he said on the new social media platform. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”

For its part, Twitter greeted the debut of Threads with a letter from its attorney accusing Meta of misappropriating trade secrets. Twitter alleges that Threads was built by former Twitter employees who were assigned to copy the social media app, and cautioned Meta not to scrape Twitter user data.

Twitter owner Elon Musk got a bit more personal on his platform Saturday (July 8):

“Threads is just Instagram minus pics, which makes no sense, given that thirst pics are the main reason people use that app,” Musk said. “How many times have you read comments on Insta pics and wished there were more? Personally, never.”