Last week, like a lot of other people, I took my first tentative step into the world of Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor. I haven’t actually posted a thread yet (and by the way, what’s the verdict—are we saying “threaded” as a verb?), but I was curious to get a sense of how the platform felt. Would it replace Twitter in my life as a source of news, commentary, and cute animal pictures?

New apps don’t have an easy road, cautions Guy Aridor, an assistant professor of marketing at Kellogg. “In general, launching a competitor social media application is difficult,” Aridor says. That’s in part because digital app usage is so rooted in habit.

Last year, Aridor conducted a study of what users would do if they temporarily lost access to Instagram or YouTube. Would they spend more time using another app of the same category (so, another entertainment app in the case of YouTube, or another social app in the case of Instagram), an app from a different category, or cut down on their app use overall?

Aridor discovered that people readily switched to other categories of apps, though this is in part because many apps span multiple categories: a social app can also be used for entertainment, for instance.

He also found that the habit-forming nature of digital apps played an important role in which apps people chose as substitutes. “If you can’t use Instagram, you will be more likely to substitute with apps that you habitually use,” Aridor told Insight.

So a new app like Threads faces a big challenge. “Competitor applications have to convince users to shift their habits,” Aridor says—and create totally new ones, on their platform.

But Aridor thinks Threads has a better chance of success than most new apps, in part because at least some people want to create new habits. Twitter’s well-publicized challenges have prompted many to leave the platform—and while some users have lost their taste for this type of app altogether, “there’s likely a large pent-up demand. These are exactly the conditions you’d want to have the potential for success.”

Meanwhile, other apps that people could spend time on as an alternative to Twitter fall short in important ways. Aridor’s research suggests that apps like Instagram and Facebook, which already serve large numbers of users, are used for different reasons than Twitter. This makes them less likely to scratch that bird-shaped itch. Other apps like BlueSky are close Twitter equivalents, but they have a very small number of users, which could limit their appeal.

All of this is good news for Threads. Since Twitter-like apps fill a different need than Instagram and Facebook, Meta “may not view this expansion as cannibalizing the time that people spend on their core applications,” Aridor says. What’s more, the company can take advantage of its wealth of proprietary data: “They can utilize the information they’ve learned about a specific consumer’s tastes on Instagram in order to provide better recommendations out of the box for users on Threads.” (Of course, whether Instagram-based preferences are relevant for Twitter-like apps remains to be seen.)

All in all, Aridor says, “relative to the other set of Twitter competitors that have emerged, the conditions are there for Threads as the most likely to do well.” But it’s also important to keep expectations in check: “There is still a lot of uncertainty and the negative reputation for privacy and moderation that Meta has gotten in the past few years could offset this and lead it to not succeed at all. The first few months of the Threads launch will be critical for determining its success.”

So, we’ll all have to wait and see—and in the meantime, you can read more about Aridor’s research on app substitution in Kellogg Insight.