Amid Twitter rebranding chaos, Threads rolls out a massive update on Android

It looks like the cage match between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is off because—to no one's surprise—the two rival CEOs can’t agree on anything. 

In early July, Meta Platforms launched the Threads app, a new text-based social media app aimed at capturing the essence of real-time interactions. With a massive launch and an influx of Instagram users transitioning to Threads, the initial excitement was amazing. In fact, Threads was quickly dubbed as a "Twitter-killer". However, this enthusiasm was short-lived, as the app's active user base experienced a steep decline soon after its launch even though it had broken many records initially.

Twitter underwent a massive rebranding exercise recently to change its name and logo to X. The company replaced the logos on the website and the apps as well as its own headquarters. Names were changed of all the associate products such as Twitter Blue subscription became X Blue subscription and TweetDeck became XPro. But it appears that the transition is not complete yet. According to reports, some users have observed that the URLs generated from the share sheet of the X app on iOS start with X.com instead of the familiar twitter.com. So far the change has only been seen in the iPhone OS and both web links and the Android app continue to show the usual domain. But that can also change in the near future.

While Twitter owner Elon Musk is still attracting most of the company-related headlines, CEO Linda Yaccarino insists that she has autonomy to run the company, now known as X.

Threads is rolling out a few feature upgrades this week intended to boost engagement as Meta's Twitter competitor works to recover some of its initial buzz.

The latest version of Samsung's custom Android layer, One UI 6, is now available in beta form for owners of the Galaxy S23 series.

Initially touted as a “Twitter-killer”, the Threads app has struggled for traction as of late. The app made an amazing debut on July 6 as it amassed 100 million followers in just 5 days, becoming the fastest platform in the world to do so. But things are looking down as the initial fad now seems to have passed. A report from market analysis firm Sensor Tower recently revealed that the average amount of time people spend on Threads daily has plummeted more than 75 percent since its debut.

As the war of words between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter owner Elon Musk over the ‘fight' intensifies, both are also battling another war of retaining the users on the platform. Just last week, Threads announced that it will soon bring search and web support to the platform, and now it seems X (formerly Twitter) is also adding quality-of-life features to ensure a higher time spent. A designer working with the company shared a post recently teasing a new feature that can soon be available. This feature will add new sorting options to see tweets on the profile tab. Instead of the current chronological-only tab, users will also get options to sort them by most liked and most engaged with posts.

You'll soon be able to access Threads from the web.

Meta's newest text-based app Threads has gone somewhat quiet in terms of new feature launches in the last week. The Instagram-powered platform enjoyed its moment of success when it hit the coveted 100 million user mark just a few days after its launch, but ever since then, it has failed to build upon that sudden user surge. As per reports, more than half of its users have left the platform in recent weeks. Some users have highlighted the app's lack of many basic features as one of the reasons for not preferring it over its rival platform X (formerly known as Twitter). However, things might change as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the platform will get two of its highly requested features “in the next few weeks”.

X (formerly known as Twitter) has been working hard to make its premium subscription X Blue appear more alluring to boost the subscriber count. Recently, it added features such as unlimited DMs, potential participation in the platform's ad revenue sharing, and access to XPro (TweetDeck). Now, adding to the already long list of benefits, owner Elon Musk announced on Thursday that verified users will also be able to download videos on the microblogging platform. However, there are some restrictions to this feature, which have been likely added to give creators more power.

You don't really get much more on-the-nose than this, but a new mod for Fallout: New Vegas replaces the in-game character Mr. House with the real-world character Elon Musk. First spotted by Kotaku, the Elon House mod, created by NoUsernameSelected, takes some cues from a pre-existing New Vegas mod which pulled the same trick with Mark Zuckerberg back in 2020. There's one twist here though: the New Vegas Musk is an AI creation.