Skip to main content

Here’s how iOS 8 cost Twitter 4M users

Image Credit: Maryland GovPics/Flickr

Twitter announced its Q4 2014 earnings on Thursday.

The company beat revenue and earnings per share estimates, but missed Wall Street’s month active user (MAU) target.

Twitter reported 288 million MAUs versus 295 million expected.

Chief financial officer Anthony Noto said the decline in users was due to Apple’s rollout of iOS 8 in September.

June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC

Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.

“We lost approximately 4 million net users due to rollouts of iOS 8,” said Noto.

Some Apple experts didn’t understand Noto’s explanation:

But Twitter explained to us that 3 million people disappeared because of a change in the Shared Links section of the Safari browser on iOS 8.

In iOS 7, if you are logged into Twitter, the Shared Links section will automatically show you tweets from people on your connected Twitter accounts. iOS 8 made the process more manual, Twitter told us. You can also follow RSS feeds in the Shared Links section, which may have reduced the prominence of Twitter links there.

Twitter said that another 1 million people dropped out as they bought new iPhones and did not install the Twitter app again, or couldn’t use it because they’d forgotten their password or other information.

All in all, 4 million users is a drop in the bucket of Twitter’s total 288 million users, but the company only missed user expectations by 7 million, so it’s significant in that respect.

This story originally appeared on Business Insider. Copyright 2015