Elon Musk's Risky Twitter Rebranding Is Tanking X's Rank And Downloads In App Store And Play Store

Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter to X has had an unsurprising outcome – the social media app's ranking and downloads have tanked in Apple Inc.'s AAPL App Store and Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google Play Store.

What Happened: Musk's rebranding of Twitter to X is starting to look like a blunder, with the app's ranking and downloads plummeting on the two most popular app stores in the world, said Eric Benjamin Seufert, a media strategist who runs the Mobile Dev Memo platform.

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According to Seufert's data, X app ranks at a measly 51 on the App Store in the top free downloads category, while it is at 66th place in the Play Store. On the other hand, X clone Threads is at number 2 on the App Store and number 6 on the Play Store.

This is despite Meta Platforms Inc.'s META Threads losing nearly 75% of its daily active users in the US.

"My hypothesis is that, while the terminally-online are entirely aware of Twitter's rebrand to X, most consumers aren't, and their searches for "Twitter" on platform stores surface ads and genuine search results that are in no way redolent of Twitter," Seufert said.

Seufert's data shows a dramatic drop in X's downloads on the App Store immediately after Musk made the rebranding announcement – it fell from the 24th rank to 64th as of August 15.

The subsequent decision to kill and replace the beloved Twitter bird with an unrecognizable ‘X' could have worsened matters.

Why It's Important: Twitter became a household name worldwide in the nearly two decades of its existence, with "Find me on Twitter" and Twitter usernames with the handle – for example, @benzinga – becoming ubiquitous.

However, Musk has made some very controversial decisions since taking over the ownership and management of the company. His decision to kill the Twitter brand and use a far more generic ‘X' name could just be among the most damaging, going by Seufert's data.

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