Threads app hits Top 5 on Apple's China App Store despite ban | TechCrunch

Threads, Meta’s new social networking platform, is quickly gaining ground in China, where Western social apps from Instagram to Facebook are banned. As of Thursday morning Pacific Time, the Twitter clone introduced by Instagram ranked fifth in the social networking category of Apple’s China App Store, just a day after launching. That’s despite the fact that the app is blocked by the Great Firewall, meaning users in mainland China have to access the platform through a censorship circumvention tool like a VPN, or virtual private network. App Store rankings take into account metrics like new app installs. Threads is currently trailing only after Chinese social giants with hundreds of millions of active users, namely, Xiaohongshu, WeChat (over 1 billion monthly users in its case), QQ and Weibo. It’s unclear whether China blocked Threads at the outset. Greatfire.org, an organization that tracks online censorship, shows that the domain www.threads.net has been unavailable in China since July 4. Threads’ presence in the China App Store isn’t all that surprising, given Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have long been available in the App Store while being banned by Great Firewall’s censorship system. It’s possible that Threads is connecting to one of Meta’s servers that
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