Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, is expected to launch on July 6th, according the App Store listing for the app. Threads had showed up on Google Play on Saturday with screenshots and some initial details, and a listing I saw on Google Play didn’t have a release date, so this date from the App Store appears to give us our first official date for when we might be able to download the app.
Here is the official — and brief — description of the app, from the App Store:
Say more with Threads — Instagram’s text-based conversation app
Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.
The listing also has what appear to be the same screenshots from the Google Play listing, showing that you’ll be able to log in with your Instagram handle, find the accounts you follow on Instagram on the new app, and post in an interface that looks a lot like many other text-based social media apps. In a companywide meeting, Meta executives also shared that the app will integrate with the decentralized social media protocol ActivityPub, as reported by my colleague Alex Heath.
Still, just because the app is available to download on July 6th doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to jump in and post. I wouldn’t be surprised if Meta does a slow rollout of some kind for the app, so you might want to be prepared to wait to actually be able to find your new non-Twitter home.
But I can understand if you’re actively seeking a new place to post. Twitter has blocked unregistered users from being able to see tweets and implemented rate limits for those who are logged in. The company is also suddenly rolling out some major changes to TweetDeck after the app began to break — and in about a month, TweetDeck is going to become a paid feature. Many tried to turn to Bluesky, but it halted new user signups for more than a day to fix issues it ran into because of the waves of people flooding the app. The CEO of Mastodon is feeling good, though.