David Bridges
Highlights
- New App: X is developing a separate messaging app to enhance user engagement outside the main platform.
- Competitive Edge: This move positions X against established messaging services like WhatsApp and Messenger.
- Encryption Focus: The new app aims to provide a secure messaging experience with encrypted DMs.
- Future Vision: Elon Musk envisions X as a comprehensive platform similar to China’s WeChat, integrating various functionalities.
X is working on another step in enacting Elon Musk’s “everything app” vision, this time via a separate messaging app, which would enable you to engage via X DMs in isolation from the main X platform.
As you can see in this example, posted by app researcher Nima Owji, you can now access a desktop version of X’s new chat interface, enabling you to manage your X DMs outside of the app itself.
X is also reportedly developing a separate X Chat mobile app as well, which would put X into direct competition with WhatsApp and Messenger as a standalone messaging platform.
That aligns with Elon’s broader vision for the project, with Musk repeatedly referring to China’s WeChat as an example of the “everything app” approach he intends to take, in order to make X a more ubiquitous, essential connection tool.
WeChat plays a major role in linking Chinese people to their digital identity, with users able to conduct all sorts of transactions, in addition to messaging, within the app. It’s become so ubiquitous, in fact, that it’s considered an essential for the billion-plus users in the nation.
That’s excited many Western social media executives over the years, with Meta, TikTok, and others all trying their hand at making their platforms more universal tools for discovery, shopping and more, in order to cement themselves as key connective tools.
Yet, for some reason, Western users haven’t warmed to the “super app” approach in the same way. While Chinese users seem much more excited about combining functionality into a single platform, for practicality and functional purpose, Western users have preferred to keep their behaviors separate, shopping in apps like Amazon, while using Facebook to connect with friends, and TikTok to watch video clips.
There are various reasons for this. The Chinese government exerts more control over local platforms, and that could add a level of assurance to such processes that Western users don’t have in corporate-owned social media and messaging entities. It might also be just a habitual difference, or maybe the popularity of WeChat is part of a broader push by the CCP to maximize monitoring over digital identities.Whatever is at play, no platform has been able to convert the WeChat approach to Western audiences in any significant way as yet.
Elon believes that X can cross the threshold here, and provide a similar transactional layer to our interactive process. And a big part of that, of course, is payments, with X moving to implement in-stream transfers, with a view to eventually enabling all kinds of financial activity within the app.
DMs, then, play a key role, as the added protection of encrypted connection will imbue a higher level of trust, while also providing more functional connective options.
Which is why a separate X Chat app is important, extending on X’s recent work to rebuild its messaging back-end, and add in its own form of encryption.
The next step, then, will be to facilitate payments, which X is still working to get licensing for, before moving into to driving more transactional behavior in X DMs.
So, will that work?
No, it won’t, and I don’t see any way that Elon Musk, who’s public trust has declined significantly since he took over at X, will be the one to bring WeChat-like functionality to Western audiences.
Even if X can reassure users that its encryption is safe (many experts have questioned X’s encryption process), and even if X can get secure money transmitter approval in the U.S. (X’s application has been held up due to concerns over Saudi investment in the platform), there’s nothing to suggest that X users will actually want to use this type of functionality, and definitely not at the scale that would be required to make it a ubiquitous super app.
X hasn’t even been able to get full approval for money transfers within the U.S., and there’s no way that the EU, for example, which Musk has made repeated public criticisms of, will approve the same in its region.
Maybe, after years of working to appease the various global regulatory groups, Musk might gain permission to implement some level of monetary transactions in the app. But then, again, who’s going to use them? What percentage of the general public would trust Elon Musk’s X with financial transactions?
Maybe something changes, but I don’t see it, and as such, I don’t see why X really needs a separate messaging app. I just don’t imagine that it’s ever going to be the financial hub that Musk envisions, and if that’s not on the cards, then X is little more than a feeder platform for xAI, and a potentially viable ad platform at some stage.
