“Musk's version of WeChat” is coming? XChat expected to launch April 17: end-to-end encryption, no ads

"MuskXChat, the version of WeChat, will be launched soon.

April 13, Elon Musk's social platform X's communication app XChat has officially confirmed that it will land on the Apple App Store App Store on April 17, and the app is now open for reservation and download.

XChat is now available on the App Store

The U.S. tech media said the product, widely known as the “U.S. version of WeChat,” is a key step in Musk's strategy to turn X into a one-stop “super application. The industry believes that its core goal is to benchmark China's WeChat, while challenging WhatsApp, Telegram and other mainstream global instant messaging tools market position.

According to the official App Store listing and the official X announcement, XChat is not a feature upgrade embedded in the main X app, but a standalone iOS app, with an app size of 171.8MB, support for iOS 26 and above, and support for more than 45 languages, including Simplified Chinese.

Officially, the core highlights of this app focus on privacy and security, all messages, calls and media content are encrypted end-to-end, only the sending and receiving parties can read the relevant content. It is worth mentioning that the official commitment is not to implant any advertisements, and will not collect or track the user's behavioral data.

In addition, XChat is equipped with a variety of advanced privacy tools, including anti-screenshot, burn-after-reading, message editing, two-way retraction, and support for large groups of up to 481 people. Users can achieve seamless synchronization between the standalone app, the X main app and the web version of the three ends, and there is no need to bind a cell phone number, you can use the X account to complete the log-in, which is a breakthrough in the traditional communication app registration restrictions. XChat also integrates the Grok AI assistant, which can be invoked with a single click during the chatting process. However, the Android version of the app is not yet available.

XChat Introduces “Burn After Reading” and More!

As early as October 2022, after Musk acquired Twitter (later renamed X) for $44 billion, he repeatedly expressed his appreciation for WeChat in public, calling WeChat “the perfect fusion of Twitter + PayPal + countless other features” and bluntly stating that in China, people can pretty much live solely on WeChat is a "perfect blend of Twitter + PayPal + countless other functions", and said that in China, people can live almost exclusively on WeChat, while there is no such all-around application in the Western market.

In December 2025, in a podcast interview, Musk further clarified his strategic vision, saying that his goal is to turn X into an upgraded version of WeChat outside of China, a super platform that integrates chatting, payment, life services, content dissemination and other functions. The independent release of XChat means that Musk's strategy has shifted from purely functional iteration to ecological infrastructure layout, and U.S. science and technology media analysts believe that Musk may hope to use this pure communication application as an entry point to lay a solid foundation for the future integration of WeChat-style functions such as payment, finance, and small programs, and to gradually build up a complete ecological closed loop.

In terms of the current global instant messaging market landscape, XChat's direct competitors are WhatsApp, owned by Meta, which has about 2 billion users, and Telegram, which has about 800 million users, in addition to Signal, which focuses on privacy protection.

XChat's core positioning of “no ads + strong privacy” attempts to accurately address the privacy concerns of current users of existing platforms, relying on the X platform's existing monthly activity of about 500 million users to rapidly accumulate initial users. However, the application's privacy commitment has also triggered widespread skepticism in the industry, with several network security experts pointing out that the “Bitcoin-style encryption” technology claimed by Musk is vague in its details and has not been subjected to any independent third-party security audits, and that all the privacy guarantees are self-certified by the X platform, which lacks objective credibility. At the same time, Apple's official privacy label shows that XChat still collects users“ location, contacts, search history and other data, which is significantly different from the official ”no data tracking" publicized by the outside world, and also makes the outside world have more questions about its privacy protection ability.