X Now Lets You Edit Videos Without Leaving the App

X has released a built-in video editor for its iPhone app. The tool lets you add captions in multiple languages, style them however you want, and use a green screen effect to swap out your background — all without switching to a separate app Engadget.

Nikita Bier, who leads product decisions at X, said the company's main goal is to make it easier for creators to produce their own content and then pay them for posting it. He also said more updates to the editor are coming in the coming weeks X, though he didn't say what those updates would be.

Why It Matters

This is not the first time X has pushed creators toward making their own videos. The platform recently added a TikTok-style reaction feature, committed $1 million to pay people who stream live, and started hiding reposts so that original videos get more visibility Engadget Engadget. In April, the company said it would downrank content that was copied from other platforms X.

All of this points in one direction: X wants to compete with TikTok.

TikTok has had these editing tools built in for years. So have Instagram Reels. Creators who wanted to use X had to film their video, export it, edit it in a separate app like CapCut, and then upload it. That's extra friction. By putting the editor inside X itself, the company keeps creators working in one place — which means they spend more time on X.

The editor will come to Android phones once X finishes rebuilding its Android app, though no date has been set TechCrunch.

What Actually Changes

Captions are a bigger deal than they might seem. Most people watch videos without sound — in the subway, at work, at home while someone else is talking. Built-in captioning means you don't have to burn text into your video file before uploading, or hope the platform adds automatic captions later. That's a real distribution advantage.

Green screen effects lower the barrier to making a certain type of short video. TikTok creators have built entire formats around them. Now X creators can do the same without buying software or learning another tool.

Neither of these features is new to the world. Other apps have had them for a long time. What matters here is that X has been behind, and this closes that gap.

The Broader Context

From a business angle, X benefits from original video in more than one way. More creators posting their own work means more engagement on the platform. That's good for advertising. Separately — and worth noting — more original video means more training data for Grok, X's artificial intelligence system, which learns from what people post publicly on X Engadget. So X has both a short-term reason (money and engagement) and a long-term reason (AI training) to push creators toward making their own content instead of just reposting other people's videos.

The choice to downrank reposts is the bigger strategic shift. X and Twitter before it have always had accounts that just repost viral videos from elsewhere. Those accounts drove a lot of traffic. Suppressing them means X is betting that it wants creators more than it wants aggregators. Whether that bet pays off — whether it actually grows the number of people making videos, or just shrinks the total amount of video on the platform — is still an open question. X has not released any numbers Engadget.

X has not said when the Android version will arrive or shared any data about how many people are using the new editor so far. Bier's mention of updates "coming weeks" suggests this is version one of the tool, not a finished product.