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Clubhouse Is Losing Steam

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Photo: Boumen Japet (Shutterstock)

Clubhouse—the company that was making headlines just a few months back for drawing major celebrities (and Elon Musk)—seems to have reached a tipping point. In April, the app reached a grand total of 922,000 downloads, new research found, a sharp downturn after bringing in millions of new users just a month earlier.

These numbers come from the analytics firm SensorTower, which had previously pointed out that the app’s been on a downward slope for months. In January, Clubhouse hit 2 million downloads. In February, the app shot past 9.5 million downloads but dipped back down to about 2.7 million in March, according to the firm’s count. Now it’s fallen short of a million downloads per month for April, a low that we haven’t seen since December of last year.

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There are all sorts of reasons those numbers might be on the decline. Some have theorized that the audio-only app, which remains exclusively for iOS, was a smash hit over the pandemic simply because so many of us were starved for conversation with other people. With vaccination numbers skyrocketing across the U.S., and people actually beginning to leave their houses for the first time in god-knows-how-long, there’s a chance that Clubhouse is simply a pandemic-era fad. There’s also the fact that high-profile competitors like Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify have collectively jumped onto the social audio train in an attempt to court Clubhouse’s user base. On Monday, for example, Twitter formally rolled out its own Clubhouse competitor, Spaces, to all Android and iOS users who have 600 followers or more.

Clubhouse, in the meantime, has been working on courting those users back. The company announced on Sunday that the company is testing an Android version of its app with a handful of “friendly testers” outside the company. Even though there isn’t a way for the broader Android community to sign up for this app right now, Clubhouse explained in its release notes that it plans to welcome these users to the platform “over the coming weeks.”