Trump's Truth Social is the 36th most popular social networking app on the Apple App Store

Truth Social
(Image credit: Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump's social media app has so far failed to become a major competitor to established social networks, The Daily Beast reported Monday.

The Beast's article, which was published at 4:46 a.m., said Trump's Truth Social was the 28th most popular social networking app on the Apple App Store, but at 11:51 a.m., it was sitting in 36th place.

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Dating apps Plenty of Fish (#17) and BLK – Dating for Black Singles (#25) are also outperforming Truth Social, which just barely edged out LGBT dating app Grindr (#39).

The top five spots are held by Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord. The App Store ranks popular social networks Twitter and Instagram in the "News" and "Photo & Video" categories, respectively.

The Beast also notes that downloads of Truth Social have nosedived from a peak of 170,000 per day to less than 8,000 and that the app's cadre of daily active users is vanishingly small — just over 500,000 compared to Twitter's 217 million.

This reporter remains 476,784th on the Truth Social waiting list.

Trump touted Truth Social, basically a Twitter clone with "truths" instead of "tweets," as a platform friendly to free speech, but it relies on the same auto-moderation software used by Facebook and Twitter. The app also features terms of service that allow the removal of any content that "annoy[s]" Trump personally.

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Grayson Quay

Grayson Quay was the weekend editor at TheWeek.com. His writing has also been published in National Review, the Pittsburgh Post-GazetteModern AgeThe American ConservativeThe Spectator World, and other outlets. Grayson earned his M.A. from Georgetown University in 2019.