Early in March, X (formerly Twitter) started testing a dedicated app called XChat among thousands of beta testers. It appears that the test phase is over and the app is ready for its public rollout. The Elon Musk-owned company has announced that XChat is now listed on the App Store, with a wide launch lined up in the coming days.
What’s the big play?
The chat app’s listing page on the App Store mentions a release date of April 17, and it will be available simultaneously for iPhone and iPad. As far as features go, the XChat app is advertising end-to-end encryption as one of its highlight features. For the unaware, E2E is currently deemed the safest security protocol to ensure that your messages are private, and no middleman or third-party (including the company that built the platform) can read your conversations.
WhatsApp and Signal, for example, implement it by default. On Instagram and Telegram, there’s a dedicated private chats feature that relies on end-to-end encryption to protect your messages.
Circling back to XChat, it will also enable screenshot blocking, which means no participant in the conversation can take a screengrab of the chats. The app will let users edit or delete sent messages, and will also let them send disappearing messages. Calling and group chats will also be a part of the package.
Ever since Musk took over X (which eventually merged with xAI, followed by a broad merger with SpaceX), plans for creating a super-app took center stage. Back in December, Musk quipped that he wants to transform X into something like WeChat, the Chinese app that allows everything from messaging and payments to reservations, among a whole bunch of other quirky services. In June last year, it was reported that the X super app would also offer investment and trading services once the super app plans materialize.
Why is this an interesting shift?
There’s more to the plans than a straightforward messaging pivot to XChat. Or at least that’s what Musk’s past claims, and the recent turn of events, suggest. On the surface, it would seem that Musk simply wants to serve a messaging app that fills the functional gaps that you can’t quite access on the social media app.
Just a day ago, Musk shared on X that WhatsApp can’t be trusted, referring to a lawsuit claiming that Meta allowed third parties access to the encrypted messages on WhatsApp. Even though WhatsApp has denied these claims, Musk’s statement added more fuel to the privacy fire. Separately, Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, claimed that WhatsApp’s encryption claims amount to the “biggest consumer fraud in history.” But that was not all.
Signal — one of the most widely trusted messaging apps out there, owing to its robust security protocols — also found itself in the line of fire. As per reports, the FBI was able to obtain the contents of Signal messages after accessing the notifications history on a suspect’s iPhone, even though the app allows a lock facility. Pavel also took a potshot at Signal, highlighting how Telegram never shows a message’s contents in the notification banner.
It seems XChat is making a splashy public debut at a time when trust in the popular privacy-first platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal is coming under scrutiny. Moreover, it would be interesting to see if X offers all the features for free, or whether some of them will be locked behind a premium subscription, just like the sibling social media service.