The app will serve as the new hub for group chats following the closure of Communities.
X’s long-awaited competitor to WhatsApp and Telegram, XChat, launched its standalone app on Friday afternoon, arriving on the iOS App Store nearly a year after being rebranded under its new title. This release signifies the complete rollout of Elon Musk’s revamped DM platform, focusing on user privacy.
Pre-orders began last week, with X promoting XChat’s fully encrypted messaging as its primary feature. In addition to end-to-end encryption, the app guarantees no user tracking, no advertising, and a variety of privacy tools within messages — including the option to hide photos from recipients post-sending.
However, there’s a drawback. X is shutting down its Communities feature to accommodate XChat, which could disappoint its small but dedicated following. Communities acted as X’s answer to Reddit’s subreddit forums, allowing users to follow curated feeds based on specific interests — similar to Bluesky’s Feeds. But, as per X’s Head of Product Nikita Bier, the feature saw limited engagement: only 0.4% of users interacted with it, and those who did were primarily “user-acquisition channels for Kick or compensated clipper communities.”
In its place, XChat will provide large-scale group chats — presently limited to 350 users, with plans to increase this number to 1,000. Communities will officially shut down on May 30.