SAN FRANCISCO, April 13, 2026, 07:04 PDT
X’s standalone messaging app XChat is slated to arrive on iPhone and iPad on April 17, according to Apple’s App Store listing, days after the company restored voice notes inside the service. The move gives Elon Musk’s platform a dedicated chat product as it tries to push beyond the main social feed.
By spinning XChat into its own app, X is moving more directly against WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal and pushing ahead with Musk’s broader attempt to turn X into a “super app.” That gives the launch more weight than a routine feature update: it is a test of whether X can turn private messaging into a product of its own. ynetglobal
Apple’s listing describes XChat as a place to “chat with anyone on X in a private, focused space built for conversation.” The free app is available for pre-order, is built by X Corp. for iPhone and iPad, and supports English plus 45 other languages; the description also promises “No ads. No tracking. Fully end-to-end encrypted.” App Store
The company has been filling out the product as launch nears. The official @chat account said on April 9 that “Voice Notes on XChat are finally here,” and a day later urged users to pre-order the iOS app with the line, “Your encrypted chats deserve their own app.” X (formerly Twitter)
This has been brewing for weeks. Michael Boswell, a product designer at X and xAI, said in March that the team had been “quietly building a standalone X Chat app for iOS,” first opening it to 1,000 TestFlight users before expanding by another 5,000 the same day. X (formerly Twitter)
Preview material points to a feature set built to mirror established messaging apps. 9to5Mac, citing the app preview, said XChat includes screenshot blocking, disappearing messages, group chats and video calls, while X’s help page says encrypted file sharing is supported and that group messages and media can now be encrypted.
But the privacy pitch is not clean. Apple’s privacy label says X Corp. indicated the app may collect data linked to users including contact info, contacts, search history, identifiers, usage data and diagnostics, and it says diagnostics may be used for third-party advertising; Apple also notes that the disclosures are not verified. Privacy researchers at Mysk highlighted the contrast on April 10, writing: “No ads. No tracking. Fully end-to-end encrypted. But it collects all this data.” App Store
Separate questions hang over the encryption design itself. Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green wrote last year that, judged as an end-to-end encryption system, XChat looked like a “game-over type of vulnerability,” and X’s own help page says the service is not yet forward secure — industry jargon meaning a stolen private key could expose older messages, not just future ones. Cryptographic Engineering Thoughts
X says it uses the open-source Juicebox protocol to store keys, plans to publish more technical detail, and says the protocol has been audited by security firm Trail of Bits. Whether that will be enough to close the gap between the privacy pitch and the disclosures before April 17 is the immediate test for XChat.
