Trump’s Truth Social Tops App Store Downloads Amid Musk’s Twitter Purchase
Trump’s Truth Social Tops App Store Downloads Amid Musk’s Twitter Purchase

By Jack Phillips

Former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social topped the Apple App Store downloads list days after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

The Truth Social app rose to No. 1 on the app charts on Tuesday, coming amid speculation that Musk’s purchase of Twitter for $44 billion would imperil the Trump-backed platform. Musk himself posted about the sudden shift in the app’s download rates.

“Truth Social is currently beating Twitter & TikTok on the Apple Store,” he wrote, which included a screenshot of a chart from AppFigures.com.

“Before April 23, Truth Social had not previously ranked since March 12,” Stephanie Chan,  an analyst with Sensor Tower, told TheWrap. “This was also the first time Truth Social has ranked at No. 1 on the overall U.S. App Store since Feb. 24 shortly after its launch.”

Truth Social is currently not available for Android platforms, although its management previously said it would be in the future. The social media app first appeared on the Apple Store in late February 2022.

The shift in the number of downloads might be a result of Truth Social’s hardware upgrades. On April 22, the firm said it had moved its applications to video-sharing platform Rumble’s cloud computing service, said CEO and former congressman Devin Nunes.

Truth Social was founded by the Trump Media & Technology Group in opposition to Twitter and other Big Tech companies amid accusations those firms are censoring conservative voices and individuals who have viewpoints that are opposed by mainstream media. After it was launched several months ago, however, users have reported an exceptionally long waitlist.

Trump, who was banned from Twitter on Jan. 8, 2021, told Fox News and other outlets this week that he doesn’t plan on joining Twitter despite Musk’s pro-free speech stance. Before he was banned, Trump was perhaps Twitter’s most influential user, having amassed more than 80 million followers.

In a recent interview with Just the News, Nunes said that the platform was now open to millions of more users due to the switch to Rumble.

“It means you are going to be getting on within hours, we are on the Apple app store, you can go download it and you are going to get on in short order,” Nunes said last week.

“We opened the new Rumble cloud … and it went off flawlessly, thankfully, because this is something that we had been beta-testing for many weeks,” he said. “I think in the next few hours or so we are going to get rid of this waitlist. Maybe tomorrow morning but it is coming quickly, it is an exciting time and it has just been fun.”

As of Wednesday morning, Digital World Acquisition Corp.—the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) behind Truth Social—saw its stock rise about 16 percent to $47.68 per share.

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