Elon Musk's X social network, formerly known as Twitter, just launched a brand-new chat app, dubbed XChat.
This standalone app goes toe-to-toe with some of the most popular apps around, including WhatsApp, Messenger, and iMessage. While it's been possible to exchange texts with other social media users inside the X social network app for some time, XChat breaks that out into its own app.
It also promises the ability to send documents, create group chats, make video and audio calls, as well as edit or delete sent messages. That'll bring the experience on XChat on par with other popular chat apps.
The listing on the Apple App Store promises: "Chat with anyone on X in a private, focused space built for conversation. No ads. No tracking. Fully end-to-end encrypted. Sign in with your X account and everyone is already there. Friends, family, creators, colleagues. Skip the invites, the phone number swaps, the 'are you on this app?' conversations. The network you spent years building works instantly."
WhatsApp introduced end-to-end encryption back in 2016, a standard that ensures others won't be able to intercept or read the messages sent within the app. The same security protocol makes an appearance in the newly-launched XChat
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XChat expands on the functionality that was already available in the built-in messaging platform in X
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Elon Musk has praised the messaging platform's focus on privacy
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Elon Musk — the richest man on the planet — completed a $44bn (£38.1bn) takeover of Twitter back in October 2022. He later tweeted “the bird is freed” and “let the good times roll”. The 54-year-old South African entrepreneur, who also runs SpaceX and The Boring Company, has previously spoken about modelling X on WeChat — a popular mobile app that dominates in China by bundling together functionality like messaging, social media, payments, and much more. The app, which is developed and operated by Tencent, boasts over a billion users.
XChat has been in testing since last year, according to reports.
XChat arrives with several features that you'll find in the biggest rivals, like Signal and WhatsApp
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You're only able to message and call people with an X account, the chat app isn't set-up to add or remove contacts based on phone numbers
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The App Store listing boasts the following perks of XChat:
- End-to-end encrypted messaging
- Edit or delete messages for everyone
- Block screenshots
- Disappearing messages you control
- Large photo, video, and file sharing
- Massive group chats
- No ads. No tracking. Total privacy.
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XChat says it will use a similarly high standard of encryption. It claims: "Privacy is the foundation. Every message is end-to-end encrypted with a key pair unique to you, protected by a PIN that never leaves your device. "No one can read your conversations. Not even X."
XChat is only available to people with an existing X account. As it stands, XChat is available to download on iPhone and iPad, but there's no word on a dedicated Android client. Signal and WhatsApp offer apps across a wide variety of platforms, including Windows on desktop, macOS, iPad, iPhone, and Android. It remains to be seen whether the new kid on the block, launched by Elon Musk, can compete at the same scale.
In the past, X executive Elon Musk has talked openly about ambitions to overhaul X into an “everything app”.