X launches a built-in video editor on iOS with captions and green screen
X now has a built-in video editor on iOS, and it's aimed squarely at the third-party tools — CapCut chief among them — that creators currently rely on to polish clips before posting. The editor supports multilingual captions with customizable styling and a green-screen background tool. Video already accounts for roughly half of everything shown in the X feed, so the push to keep editing inside the app is less a surprise than a logical next step.
The features
Nikita Bier, X's Head of Product, announced the editor on July 6. The core pitch is frictionless: record, trim, add captions, swap your background, and publish — all without exporting to a separate app and importing back. Multilingual caption support means the tool has at least some appeal for creators who post in more than one language, though X hasn't disclosed exactly which languages are covered or how many.
More features are coming "in the coming weeks," per TechCrunch. The editor is iOS-only for now; Android is delayed because X's app is still being rebuilt from the ground up.
Today we're launching a brand new Video Editor and Recorder in the iOS app.
— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) July 6, 2026
This includes some long-awaited features:
• Overlay captions in multiple languages and customize their look
• Green Screen—Add custom backgrounds using posts or photos from your camera roll
One of… pic.twitter.com/d9gNKqpTTw
The CapCut angle
CapCut, owned by ByteDance — TikTok's parent — has tens of millions of downloads and a deep library of trending templates. X's editor doesn't match that library, but it removes the export step entirely, which is where most casual creators lose momentum. With U.S. regulatory pressure on ByteDance ongoing, a native tool that keeps video data on X's servers rather than a Beijing-linked platform has practical appeal beyond just convenience.
X is also shifting how it pays creators. The platform has been quietly cutting visibility for reposts and clips imported from other services, nudging the algorithm toward original video. A separate $1 million payout fund tied to its Live Studio feature, announced earlier in July, reinforces the same direction, as Digital Trends notes.
What's missing
There's no word yet on when Android users get access — a significant gap given Android's market share. Pro-tier or paid features haven't been mentioned either. For now, the video editor is a basic but functional starting point that takes clear aim at reducing X's dependency on tools it doesn't control. Whether it can pull creators away from CapCut's template ecosystem is a longer-term question.