It started as what Instagram head Adam Mosseri called a zany idea. Two and a half years later, it has redrawn the map of text-based social media in America and around the world.
The shift did not arrive with a headline-grabbing moment. It built slowly, month by month, until a single data point from a market-intelligence firm made the new reality impossible to ignore.
A number that looked impossible two summers ago
When Meta’s text-based platform launched in July 2023, it signed up 100 million users in five days, an extraordinary opening sprint.
Then engagement cooled. Critics wrote off the launch as a curiosity that would fade once the novelty wore off.
They were wrong.
Following the initial interest, the rate of growth may have declined, but the platform has now reached a monthly active user base of 400 million.
The slow-motion squeeze that Wall Street finally noticed
While one platform was climbing, the other was sliding.
In June 2025, Threads’ mobile app saw 115.1 million daily active users, marking a 127.8 percent increase compared to the previous year, while X reached 132 million daily active users, reflecting a 15.2 percent year-over-year decline.
That gap of roughly 17 million daily users in June was closing fast.
The trend was structural, not triggered by any single controversy.
Analysts pointed to Meta’s ecosystem advantage and aggressive product development, with the app benefiting from constant promotion across Facebook and Instagram.
A strong focus on creators and a steady rollout of new features, including communities, direct messages, long-form posts, and experimental tools like games, added further momentum.
How a platform grows 127 percent in one year
The strategy behind the growth is straightforward on paper and hard to replicate in practice.
The path from Instagram’s 2 billion users to the platform’s monthly audience demonstrates the power of ecosystem leverage.
Meta bypassed the cold-start problem that kills most new social networks by allowing seamless account creation through Instagram profiles and cross-promoting content between platforms.
Features kept arriving. Threads’ growth followed a wave of new additions over the past year, including DMs, fediverse integrations, custom feeds, AI tools and more.
For context on just how fast the text-social space is evolving, consider that Bluesky grew from 10 million users in September 2024 to 40.2 million by November 2025, a 302 percent increase driven by major events including the US presidential election.
Even with that surge, it remains a fraction of the scale now at play between the two main rivals, as covered in our LinkedIn AI-slop story showing how every text-based platform is reconfiguring itself under pressure right now.
The moment the scoreboard flipped
Similarweb’s data, reported by TechCrunch, shows that Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of January 7, 2026, while X has 125 million daily active users on mobile devices.
That is the number. Threads, the app that Instagram head Adam Mosseri once described as a zany idea to compete with Twitter, is now the more-used text social app on mobile, globally.
The data indicates that Threads pulled ahead of X on mobile sometime between late October and early November 2025, following a prolonged period of steady growth rather than a sudden spike, with the gap having widened further by the time Similarweb published its January figures.
X still holds real advantages. X was seeing around 145.4 million daily web visits as of mid-January 2026, while Threads saw 8.5 million daily web visits across Threads.com and Threads.net combined.
On a monthly basis, X’s total user count also remains higher.
But the mobile daily-use figure is the one that matters most to advertisers calculating where attention actually lives each day, and that figure now belongs to Threads.
This connects directly to the broader race for platform dominance that saw ChatGPT break every monthly-user speed record in the same period, as audiences have never been more willing to try new digital destinations.
What the overtake means for the people who use both apps every day
For ordinary users, the shift shows up in subtler ways than any headline number.
The platform’s median engagement rate of 6.25 percent is 73.6 percent higher than X’s 3.6 percent, and Threads is projected to generate billions in incremental revenue for Meta.
That engagement gap is why brands and creators are reallocating attention. More posts, more replies, more time spent per session on one side of the ledger and a slow bleed of the same metrics on the other.
The mobile DAU overtake signals a structural shift in text-based social media. Threads surpassing X with 141.5 million versus 125 million mobile daily active users is not a statistical footnote but a fundamental changing of the guard.
The broader monthly user count still favors X for now. But if the daily trend line holds, the monthly scoreboard may not stay that way for long.
