Instagram Threads, Twitter’s competitor from Meta, is expected to be launched on July 6, according to the App Store listing for the app showing a version ready for Apple’s iPhone. Sleuths have also spotted what appears to be an early listing on the Google Play Store, which originally showed up over the weekend.
In recent months, a spate of direct competitors have emerged for Twitter, and these include former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey’s Blueskey, and Donald Trump’s Mastadon. However, Threads could be the biggest rival for Twitter, especially given Meta’s reputation of borrowing competing ideas and doing them very well.
Threads was secretly released for a limited time over the weekend, and screengrabs show a dashboard that looks similar to Twitter. Meta describes Threads as a “text based conversation app”.
This release comes at a time when users are going sour on the popular microblogging app Twitter, especially as Elon Musk puts many of its features behind the paywall. Twitter has said that the popular user dashboard, TweetDeck will go behind a paywall in 30 days time. Moreover on Saturday Musk restricted the number of tweets users could see, citing extreme “data scraping”.
It appears from Meta’s Threads app that it will be a free service – and there will be no restrictions on how many posts a user can see.
“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow” the description on the App Store says.
Pictures show screengrabs from the app, that look almost identical to Twitter.
It being a Meta app, Threads will also hoover up data on your phone, including location data, purchases and browsing history. Former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey also commented on the excessive data that will be collected by the app, “All you Threads, they belong to us,” Dorsey quipped as he posted a screenshot of over 10 categories of user data that will be collected by Meta’s Threads app.
The threads app will be available for download by 10AM ET on July 6.
Published on July 4, 2023
