X app downloads slipped 26% as Android installs fell in July 2025

Could users be getting tired of the OG text-based social media app?

by Louis Eriakha

Updated August 20, 2025

Around this time last year, X was rolling out shiny new features almost every other week. From AI-powered news snippets to passkey login for Android, the platform felt alive with updates. The excitement translated into numbers too, with the app hitting more than 11 million downloads in July 2024, a figure it managed to sustain through August.

Fast forward a year, and things aren’t looking nearly as bright. In July 2025, X’s mobile downloads slipped to around 8.2 million, marking a 26% drop from the same time last year. On paper, that’s a steep decline, but the story behind it is even more interesting.

The bulk of the slump came from Android, where downloads dropped from 7.7 million to 4.3 million, a staggering 44% decline year-over-year. Meanwhile, iOS told a different story, with installs actually climbing up to 3.9 million from 3.4 million, marking a 15% increase and even hitting a record week.

The Android app has long had a reputation for not being the most reliable, with frequent complaints of it crashing or bugging out –so this might have had something to do with it. Even X’s new head of product, Nikita Bier, has acknowledged this and announced plans for an “Android Dream Team” to rebuild the app, but in the meantime, the drop-off has been too significant to ignore.

Overall, it's not exactly clear what's caused this decline, but this comes just as one of X's competitors, Threads, hits 400 million monthly users. Now I'm not saying these two are linked, but the timing seems interesting. Bluesky, another major competitor, has also been slowly growing in the background, recently hitting 38 million users, so it's probably still a tempting option for many.

Either way, it will take a while before we get to see if this is something for X to be worried about or not. X has survived plenty of bumps in the road before, but with competition heating up and one of its biggest platforms bleeding users, the question is whether this is another hurdle to clear or the start of something more serious.