For months now, Donald Trump and his inner circle have been talking up a new social media mobile application that they were going to release, which would not censor users unlike the current market incumbents. Yesterday, that app finally launched to the American public on iOS only.
Truth Social, as it is called, was soon a hit among conservatives who were looking for an alternative to Twitter since the social media giant started banning extreme right wing views in the last year or so. Within 12 hours of launch, the app had rocketed to the top of Apple's Free Apps list.
Conservatives' delight at the launch of this new app can be summed up by House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene's own Twitter account was recently suspended for spreading Covid-19 misinformation.
"I understand what millions of conservatives have gone through having their personal freedom of speech stolen from them by Big Tech for not parroting the approved messaging," she said.
Despite the seemingly successful launch, there are also seemed to be a lot user issues the app faced. Not only did it take multiple attempts to complete registration, many users noticed that waitlists going into the hundreds of thousands to use the app.
While Trump supporters have claimed this proof of the app's immense popularity and detractors have claimed that it is proof of bad design planning, it remains that most users are still unable to access Truth Social.
The platform's tech team themselves seem to have acknowledged the issue, by stating that "overwhelming demand on launch" force them to limit the number of signups, and that they were "working to increase signup capacity for onboarding."
Additionally, Truth Social's status update page shows that the app faced an outage for 13 hours and 14 minutes on launch day, presumably related to the unexpected number of signups.
However, as of this article, the app seems to be working fine, and there seem to be plans for an Android app in the near future as well.
Edited by Anju Narayanan