X has introduced video and audio conferencing features as part of CEO Elon Musk’s ambitions to transform the platform into an “everything” app.

Video and audio calling, initially announced in August, is now available for iOS X users and will be available for Android users soon. Only “Premium” X subscribers can make calls (at least for now), with subscriptions costing $8 a month or $84 a year. However, all accounts are able to receive calls.

Users can control who calls them via Direct Messages Settings. By default, users can receive calls from accounts they follow or have in their address book, assuming they’ve previously given X access to their address book. To be able to call another user, they must have sent that user a Direct Message at least once previously. Users can choose to disable calls, as a way to protect themselves from spam or abuse.

X, formerly known as Twitter, is aiming to recover lost customers with new features and an “everything in one place” brand of service, with the Washington Post last week reporting a 30 percent decline in active X users and the news watchdog group Media Matters for America saying earlier this month that the business had lost half of its top advertisers since Musk acquired X this time last year.

What Does This Mean for the UC and Collaboration Market?

In a year in which WhatsApp and Apple have also made inroads into the enterprise communications and collaboration space, X’s progression into the market is intriguing.

Each company’s position (and ambition) is markedly different — WhatsApp and Apple are generally looking to broaden their horizons and capitalise on their consumer communications market share through introducing enterprise-targeting capabilities to established and widely circulated products, while X is trying new strategies to address declining advertiser and active user numbers.

However, that both have made conspicuous attempts to provide communications and collaboration capabilities suggests that Musk’s idea of turning X into an “everything” solution is vaguely illustrative of many tech companies’ broader ambitions. Zoom, for example, has at this stage far surpassed its initial niche as an excellent video conferencing platform, with refined capabilities including Zoom Chat and the recently announced Zoom Docs capturing its emerging status as an all-in-one communications and collaboration service.

X is certainly starting from well behind in the race to compete with the likes of Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet in video conferencing, with a currently limited feature set and only being available for mobile — at least for now.

Given the depth of features and speed and quality of performance — not to mention the enterprise-grade security systems those platforms have introduced over time — it will likely take significant investment and expertise (and time) to seriously compete with the UC and collaboration giants. The potentially industry-reshaping impact of AI features through the likes of Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Duet AI would extend that gap even further.

Where X might mave an advantage over the established UC companies, albeit one shared by WhatsApp, could be potentially speed and spontaneity of use. Being able to quickly call a friend or colleague over X with one click could be more straightforward than booting up a separate platform.



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