The social network devised and created by Donald Trump, Truth Social, has not been approved by Google to access its store on Android. The company made it clear that the various threats and violence occurring within the app has meant that it has not yet been cleared to join Google’s Play store. The app of the former president of the United States is still absent from the download platform of the technological giant.
Google has been very hesitant to add the conservative social network to the store. The greatest concerns are found in the lack of moderation when expressing oneself on current issues. Devin Nunes, CEO of Truth Social, raised a week ago that he is concerned about the app’s absence from the Google Play store. In an interview with Real America’s Voice, Nunes commented that “we’re waiting for their approval and…I don’t know why it’s taking so long.”
A source accessed by the Axios portal commented that Google is not comfortable with incitement to violence and threats linked to this platform. These problems, according to the technology giant, are very typical of social networks that are ideologically defined as right-wing. Trump launched this platform at the end of 2021, with exclusive use for iOS and in the Apple store since February of this year.
Truth Social and its absence in Google Play
A statement made by Google to Axios states that “on August 19, we notified Truth Social of several violations of standard policies in the submission of its current application.” In the same text, the tech giant asked the social network to “have effective systems in place to moderate user-generated content, it is a condition of our terms of service for any app to be published on Google Play.”
In February, as mentioned above, the app arrived in Apple’s App Store, after a trial period on these devices with the iOS operating system. The application enjoyed some popularity in its beginnings and then it has had different ups and downs.
The latest spike in downloads came after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s exclusive club in early August to seize classified documents. Data.ai, a mobile analytics firm, acknowledged that more than 13,000 downloads per day occurred in the days following the police event. This implied a five-fold increase over what had happened the previous week.
By not having the “ok” from Google to download the app on Android smartphones, Truth Social is losing a good portion of users of this type of smartphones. Android devices are 44 percent of the market share in smartphone operating systems in the United States. However, the app’s main problem lies in the fight against trolls, who have managed to disfigure the previous version of the platform, along with financial problems that have been known for debts with the web host for almost two million dollars.
