Donald Trump has officially joined the social media platform race this week with the public rollout of his platform, Truth Social.
The app, which draws a lot from Twitter, finally opened up to the public this week and immediately appeared in the #1 spot in the US App Store. It's worth noting that it's only available in the US App store and nowhere else right now.
It achieved that success thanks to pre-orders, a feature of the App Store that allows users to subscribe to have an app automatically downloaded when it's released.
The app spent the majority of the week in the top spot, first thanks to pre-orders and then thanks to the wild amount of news coverage it received. As of this morning, it's lost its top spot and is now sitting in #4.
Because there is no Android side to this app, a clone made its way to the top of Google Play earlier in the week. However, it's been pulled since.
We estimate that in its first week in the store, including Friday (I'm forecasting a bit), Trump's Truth Social app was downloaded more than 1 million times.
I was curious to see how that compared to downloads of similar social platforms that launched over the last few years, so I compared the total downloads of Truth Social, GETTR, Rumble, and the original, Parler.
To make the comparison fair, I limited the data to focus only on the US and only on the App Store.
Truth Social ranks third in the list of all-time downloads, which is led by Parler with more than 3.5 million downloads. And if you're thinking, where are all these Parler downloads from last year, those included Android and other countries. GETTR is in a similar boat where there are a lot of international downloads and mainly from Android devices.
But Trump's app isn't available internationally or on Android.
The marketer in me questions the decision to focus on the App Store, but politics make little sense, so I'm not going to continue that thought.
This is already getting longer than I'd like, but I'll end by saying that I'm very curious to see who will be using this app in the long term. Its description makes it clear the creators want diversity and not to become a silo like those other attempts at competing with Twitter, but is that possible?
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