Meta’s Threads now has more daily mobile users than X, riding steady growth, creator tools and cross-promotion from Instagram and Facebook despite X’s web lead.
Threads Pulls Ahead of X on Mobile Daily Usage
Meta’s Threads has quietly pulled ahead of X on smartphones, marking a major shift in the battle for real-time social media. According to market intelligence firm Similarweb, Threads reached 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of 7 January, while X recorded around 125 million daily mobile users. The figures underline that Threads is no longer just a promising newcomer; it is now outpacing its older rival where most people actually access social apps — on their phones.
Importantly, analysts say this is not a short-lived spike driven by a single news event. Instead, the data reflects months of steady growth in daily usage on Threads’ mobile apps. While X continues to dominate on the web, the balance of attention on mobile suggests that user behaviour is gradually tilting towards Threads for everyday posting, scrolling and community engagement, especially among younger and creator-led audiences.
X Faces Scrutiny Over Deepfake Abuse and Safety Issues
The latest numbers come against a backdrop of growing regulatory and public concern around harmful content on X. Recently, users exploited X’s integrated AI tool, Grok, to generate non-consensual nude images of women, including in some cases minors. The deepfake abuse sparked outrage and renewed questions about the platform’s safeguards, moderation systems and responsibility to prevent such misuse of generative AI.
The controversy prompted the California Attorney General to open an investigation into Grok’s role in enabling explicit deepfakes. Similar probes have reportedly been launched in the United Kingdom, the European Union, India, Brazil and other jurisdictions. While Similarweb’s analysis suggests that Threads’ recent gains were driven more by longer-term usage trends than by any single scandal, the negative headlines around X have clearly pushed some users and developers to explore alternatives, including newer platforms such as Bluesky, which has also seen a bump in app installs.
Features and Cross-Promotion Power Threads’ Growth
Threads’ rise on mobile is also being fuelled by Meta’s broader ecosystem. The app enjoys constant cross-promotion from Instagram and Facebook, where existing users are regularly prompted to try Threads, follow creators and import their social graphs with minimal effort. For many users, this seamless onboarding reduces the usual friction of joining a new platform and starting from zero followers.
At the product level, Threads has spent the past year rolling out new features at an aggressive pace. The platform has added interest-based communities, improved content filters, direct messages, long-form text options, disappearing posts and even experimental social games. By focusing on creators and everyday conversations rather than only breaking news or politics, Threads is positioning itself as a slightly calmer, more lifestyle-oriented alternative to X, which may be helping it win sustained daily engagement.
Habitual Use Rises as Web Gap and US Battle Continue
Meta has previously said that Threads crossed 400 million monthly active users in 2025, and later reported that it had reached about 150 million daily active users by October of that year. The latest Similarweb figures indicate that this growth has continued into 2026, with more people now opening the app as a regular habit each day rather than only during news storms or social media controversies. That kind of routine use is crucial for any platform hoping to build a durable, long-term audience.
However, X still holds a strong lead on the web. Similarweb estimates that X attracts around 150 million daily web visits, compared with only 8.5 million daily visits to Threads’ web domains. In the United States, X remains ahead overall, though the gap is narrowing rapidly. A year ago, X had roughly twice as many daily active users in the US as it does now, while Threads has been closing the distance on mobile with triple-digit year-on-year growth. The result is an increasingly competitive landscape in which Threads has the edge on phones, X dominates on desktop, and new entrants like Bluesky continue to test how much appetite there is for a fresh generation of social networks.
