‘Fetch’ Is Not Happening on Android ⇥ app.sensortower.com

Here is something strange: while Meta’s Threads placed second on Apple’s most popular apps of 2025 list, it appears to matter far less to Android users.

I could not find a similar list to Apple’s as provided by Google, but Sensor Tower scrapes those charts regularly. In the last ninety days — all I can see without paying — Threads has danced around the top ten free apps on the U.S. App Store, as one might expect for one of the most popular apps of the year. On Android, however, it never cracks the top ten. This is not solely a U.S. phenomenon; Threads seems to be less popular in Canada, but its App Store ranking is dramatically better than its Play Store ranking.

Also, it is not like Android has a radically different list of popular apps. Right now, like on iOS, ChatGPT is at the top of the U.S. Play Store chart, two different versions of TikTok take third and fourth place — second place is Fortnite — and the top ten also includes Instagram and WhatsApp. The main differences between iOS and are the lack of Google apps on the Play Store ranking, presumably because they are preinstalled. This chart is only a snapshot of today’s rankings, but even over the last ninety days, TikTok and Instagram show durable popularity, while Threads struggles.

I previously compared Threads’ ranking in Mexico and Taiwan. So, for completeness’ sake, Threads has been pretty popular in the Mexican App Store, but is not even in the top fifty on Android. In Taiwan, Threads has spanned the top twenty free apps on iOS but, at a glance, it is easily putting in the best Android performance here.

What is going on here? Perhaps Apple and Google use different measurements to calculate their app ranking charts, so any comparison between the two is flawed from the jump. Neither company publishes its methodology for calculating those rankings. Maybe Threads is a worse app on Android than it is on iOS.

But the seeming disparity in popularity between the two platforms is a curiosity. I would assume social apps should, all else being equal, attract similar audiences across both platforms. That is true for apps like TikTok and Instagram. It is not true for Threads, which seems to attract a greater share of iOS users than Android. Strange.