Truth Social is top free app, with Twitter second on iOS Apps store

Truth Social on Tuesday ranked as the No. 1 free app on the online iOS apps store, with the Twitter app in second.

The massive surge for the social media app started by former President Donald Trump even caught the attention of the billionaire who is now in the process of buying Twitter.

“Truth Social is currently beating Twitter & TikTok on the Apple Store,” Elon Musk tweeted.

Truth Social was started by Trump and is owned by the Trump Media and Technology Group. The site was launched in late February but had limited new arrivals as the result of an extended beta testing period, which also creating a significant wait list of potential users.

However, the company recently completed the site's long-prepared migration to Rumble, which has eliminate the backlogs.

On Monday, as Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced a deal with Twitter to buy the platform for roughly $44 billion, Trump said he would not return to it. 

"I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth," he said on Fox News.

Trump Media and Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes told Just the News on Friday that the backlog of accounts waiting to use to the platform has been cleared and is now open to millions of users. 

That same day, Truth Social said the company had completed its move to a new cloud system run by Rumble that would allow it to onboard millions of new users.

Truth Social had throttled new user onboarding after its launch in February, focusing on an extended beta period to test the platform and finish the migration to Rumble's cloud.

Despite the controlled rollout, early influencers on the Truth Social platform have reported higher engagement with fewer followers than what they generated with platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

"The traffic to the site and to the show is off the chart," radio host Dan Bongino recently told Just the News, directly challenging reports the platform is a failure. "The engagement is extraordinary right now."

Nunes explained the reasoning behind a controlled rollout in a recent Just the News TV interview, saying he preferred ensuring quality control over a rushed deployment.

"If you look at Truth Social, where we continue to grow every single day, even though we're just barely in the testing phase, we continue to prove out the process and focus on our quality and reliability," Nunes said earlier this month.