Meta's Twitter competitor is now available on the App Store, and can sync Instagram followers and accounts

On July 4, Threads, a Twitter competitor developed by Meta, the parent company of social media platform Instagram, was launched on the App Store. According to the data of the App Store, Threads is expected to be officially launched on July 6.

This is a good time for Meta to launch a new app. Last weekend, Twitter platform repeatedly reported errors due to limiting the number of tweets viewed by different accounts, which led to a significant increase in traffic for Twitter competitors such as Spill, Bluesky and Post. In addition, Threads has another advantage that it can directly sync users' Instagram followers and accounts, without having to rebuild the network from scratch. In other words, Threads users already have existing Instagram circles from the beginning.

"From the topics you care about today to what's trending tomorrow, Threads is where the community comes together to discuss everything,” reads the app’s description on the Apple App Store. “Whatever you’re interested in, follow and connect directly with your favorite creators, others interested in the same things, or build your own loyal fan base to share your thoughts, opinions, and creativity with the world.”

Although Threads is closely related to Instagram, it will be a standalone application. From the preview page of the app, it seems that Threads users can like, comment, repost and share posts. Screenshots of Threads on the Apple App Store also show that users can control which audience can reply to the post content, which can be everyone, people the user follows, or only those who are mentioned in the post.

The launch of Threads is not particularly surprising. There have been rumors that Meta is going to release such an app in the past few months. According to reports, an Instagram spokesperson described Threads as a "decentralized" social application. In the PPT that promoted the app to top influencers, Meta said that Threads will be compatible with Mastodon, an open source social media hosted on the decentralized network ActivityPub. But Instagram is a centralized application, and it doesn't make sense if Threads is part of Instagram. Other than that, all the details about Threads in the Apple App Store are consistent with the situation described in the previous promotional PPT.

Meta's non-primary apps haven't always been successful. Over the past few years, the company has launched products like anonymous teen app tbh, Cameo-like app Super, Nextdoor clone Neighborhoods, couples app Tuned, student-centric social network Campus, video dating service limitless, and more. But Threads comes at the perfect time to take advantage of Twitter's ongoing chaos. Whether Threads succeeds will ultimately depend on consumers, though, and whether they want Meta to control another aspect of their social media experience.