Though Elon's X team persists in touting its app's popularity as "the #1 news app in more than 140 countries worldwide," overall, X's downloads aren't rising in-step, while Meta continues to dominate the rankings of overall apps.

According to Sensor Tower's latest data, Instagram took the top spot in the most downloaded apps in Q1 2024 followed by TikTok, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
Actually, Meta's dominance goes a bit further than that: Threads is in 11th place, and Messenger is at 12th place on the list.

X didn't appear in the top listings but is currently at 25th place in the "Top Free - Overall" rankings.

Which means that X is still at the receiving end, and is still a popular app at the larger scale too. But it is not doing as good as how Elon and Co would like to garner, especially considering they single it out, talking about how it is the most popular news app, and identify this as the reason why mainstream media is so afraid of X.
Which is not true.

Here's why X is actually the most downloaded news app.

Back in 2016, what was then called Twitter had some years of less-than-great performance. Despite a few quarters of slowing growth after beating analysts' expectations, Facebook and Instagram were booming and building up pressure on the market analysts, so Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey decided on a genius move to transform and reboot the company. If it changed its categorization on the App Store listings from "Social Media" to "News," it would no longer be directly comparable with Facebook, IG, etc. and Twitter was already seeing a lot more downloads than the existing leaders in the "News" app rankings, apps like CNN, Fox News, BuzzFeed, etc.

Because no one needs to download those apps, they were getting the updates from those apps on social platforms, like Twitter, so Twitter re-categorized as a News app.

It's not a news app. In fact, it can't make the same change on the Google Play Store because it doesn't qualify as a News app under Google's parameters.

But on The App Store, it shot straight to number one in the News category, that's a story it can reframe for the market, in order to avoid negative comparison with other social apps.

Which didn't really work then, and doesn't work now, because everyone knows that Twitter/X is not a "News" app, and should not be compared to those other aggregator tools.

And Twitter ran with it, and Elon's running with it now as a means of essentially reframing the app.

But overall, in comparison to other social media platforms, which X invariably is, it's not close, with even Meta's Twitter clone Threads now besting X in overall downloads.

What does that mean for the future of Elon's X project?

So, there is still much scope there, with some 250 million people still logging into X every day to catch up on the latest updates.
It still seems to be as if X can be a bigger consideration if Elon and Co. get it right but yet to find its pathway forward, and Musk's various changes do not resonate on a broader scale.

It's working on AI and payments; it's still building out its original video content slate. But for now, Meta is winning the battle.
 
Why this is being done is not all that different from 2016: Elon and Co. are repositioning X's fight to be with news apps instead.