After last week’s election, Elon Musk emerged as the unquestioned winner. However, Musk and his social media platform X are not winning at the top of the mobile app charts. X’s competitors, Bluesky and Threads, have seen their popularity rise in Apple’s App Store in the week since the election.
Bluesky appears to be the big winner, as many users have apparently moved away from Musk’s X. The reason often cited is that Musk is campaigning for Trump and is using X as a campaign tool. Bluesky is currently the number one free app in the US App Store. The alternative social media platform has also just topped the 15 million user mark, with around 100,000 people logging in per day since the election.
Threads is tightly integrated with Instagram, is owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, and is currently at number 2 on the App Store. Musk’s X (previously known as Twitter) occupies a distant 27th place on the charts. A significant number of X users are looking for alternatives to Musk’s platform.
Given his significant influence over the incoming Trump administration, there will likely be no sleepless nights for Musk, but for X’s owners, App Store rankings are something of an obsession.
Musk has frequently bragged that X has been ranked number 1 in the news category on the US and international App Store charts since the election. It’s worth noting that X doesn’t have much competition in the News category, since most apps in this space belong to traditional media publishers like The New York Times or Fox News. Apart from
Aside from X and Reddit, most social media platforms place their iOS apps in the more competitive “Social Networking” category. Bluesky currently holds both awards, so #1 in this category means #1 overall in the App Store. (Another example: Meta’s WhatsApp iOS app is #3 in the Social Networking category and #8 in the Top Charts.) However, X is ranked #1 in the “News” category in the App Store, which corresponds only to #27 overall.
