Ever since Meta launched Threads a few months ago, the accounts were tied to Instagram. To delete your Threads account, you would have to delete your Instagram account too, which was very inconvenient, especially for those with a significant number of followers.
Although Meta promised to address this issue, it seems that the option to delete a Threads account without removing the associated Instagram account will not be available anytime soon.
Meta’s chief privacy officer for product, Michel Protti, mentioned to TechCrunch that the company is working on launching this feature by December. While it could mean a release in the coming days, large companies prefer to have a longer launch window to ensure a polished release rather than rushing it ahead of schedule.
"Technically, it was extremely challenging to allow deletion of a separate Threads account without also deleting your overall Instagram account out of the gate. So, we paid particular attention to ensuring the user could still exercise their deletion rights, by deactivating the account to sort of hide all content, setting it to private or deleting individual threads,” Protti explained.
Threads has been gradually adding basic features that were missing when the app was initially launched in July. However, Meta’s app has struggled to retain its userbase due to the lack of features. Despite the company’s efforts to narrow the gap with other popular social apps, progress has been slow.
Insider Intelligence reports that after reaching approximately 100 million sign-ups at launch, Threads now has around 24 million monthly active users in the United States.