With the departure of X CEO Linda Yaccarino, which was announced Wednesday, the company that defined text-first social networking faces renewed competition.
Year-over-year, the Elon Musk-owned social network has seen its daily active user base decline by roughly 10% as of the second quarter of 2025, according to new data provided by app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. While X’s user base is still 65% larger than Meta’s Threads and 10 times larger than its next-biggest rival, Bluesky, X’s lasting victory in this space is not guaranteed.
On mobile devices, there’s already some indication that Threads is catching up.
New data from market intelligence provider Similarweb released this week indicates Threads is nearing X’s daily app users on mobile. In June 2025, Threads’ mobile app for iOS and Android saw 115.1 million daily active users, representing 127.8% year-over-year growth; X reached 132 million daily actives, as its year-over-year growth declined by 15.2%.
Image Credits:Similarweb
Overall, X is still larger than Threads thanks to its more prominent web presence.
X also has other advantages, which could make for an interesting fight between the tech giants. On X, user engagement and loyalty remain strong, despite the increased competition from Meta as well as open source social networking movements like Bluesky and Mastodon, and other startups. According to Sensor Tower’s data, X users spend an average of 31 minutes per day on the platform in the second quarter of 2025, which was nearly quadruple that of Threads, at 8 minutes per day.
Plus, nearly half (48%) of X’s global monthly app users in the quarter interacted with the platform on a daily basis, compared with 33% for Threads, the firm said.
But Threads can’t be counted out yet, simply because X is larger. Though Threads may have fewer daily active users than X, it’s been seeing stronger growth.
Over the past year, Threads’ global app daily active users were up 160% year-over-year, the Sensor Tower’s data shows, driven in part by the rollout of new features and functions, as well as by its ties to Meta’s other apps, like Facebook and Instagram, which serve as funnels.
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