Meta's Twitter competitor Threads has been flying off the shelves — it gained 100 million sign-ups within five days of the launch. But its abscence in the EU, some AI-powered content generator apps try to gain advantage out of it.

Today, Apple has removed one of the biggest gainers -an app called Threads for Insta developed by SocialKit LTD. It is the content generation app that lets you generate posts based on AI-driven models. The app already occupied the top charts in the social media category in countries like Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands before Apple removed it from the App Store. According to the developer duo Mysk from Germany, this app climbed charts in many countries first. Mysk mentioned how Apple has suspended the developer account of SocialKit LTD as well as all the apps made by them.
Switzerland's No. 1: pic.twitter.com/xr7TzkWsEb

Per analytics firm Sensor Tower, the app has managed to get 300,000 downloads in such a short time-mainsly from EU-based users. Abe Yousef, the firm's senior analyst, said that the app has been in the overall top 20 charts of the iOS app store in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.

App seems to have only made an appearance after Meta released Threads, however, there are a small number of other apps with similar names and functionality floating around on the App Store, none of which currently appear in any top charts.

We have approached Apple and Meta for comment; we will update this story if we hear back.

The issue with Threads copycats is not just an App Store problem. Before Instagram launched Threads on July 6, a few impersonating apps were already making rounds on the Play Store before Google eventually took them down.

Example: FAKE #Threads – Instagram app on Google Play Store. Mobile app stores are so great at holding gatekeeping apps that don't give 30% of everything but forget the actual curation before naive users get scammed as they trust #Google & #Apple … thinking it's actually safe.

Impersonating popular apps is not new to the App Store. A few months into this year, several apps with "ChatGPT" in their name rode the wave of OpenAI not having an official ChatGPT app. At that time, the AI company didn't even have an official ChatGPT API.

Last week, Meta was threatened with a lawsuit that Twitter will file against it for allegedly poaching people from the company owned by Elon Musk. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone remarked on this saying, "No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that's just not a thing."