Audio and video calls on X: what has to happen first

#Quick answer

Audio and video calls on X are free for every account: X's help page states that all accounts can make calls and all accounts can receive them. Open your messages with the envelope icon, open a conversation, tap the phone icon, and pick Audio call or Video call. The catch nothing in the interface tells you is that the person must have sent you a Direct Message at least once before, or there is no call to place. Enhanced call privacy, which hides your IP address, ships switched off.

Last updated: October 2026

#TL;DR

Calling on X (formerly Twitter) is one of those features where the published guidance and the live product drifted apart and never reconciled. Search for it and you get articles explaining that you need a Premium subscription, which stopped being true in February 2024. What you do not get is the prerequisite that actually blocks most people, or the privacy default that matters more than either. This page covers the steps, the two gates, the four who-can-call-me options, the IP question, and the state of group calls.

#The Premium rule everybody still quotes is dead

Worth clearing up first, because it sends people to the wrong screen.

X shipped calling in October 2023, iOS first. Ahead of the rollout, TechCrunch reported on 25 September 2023 that the feature would be premium-subscriber-only, and at launch that is how it worked: Premium accounts placed calls, everyone could receive them. Then on 24 February 2024, Engadget reported that X had started giving non-paying users the ability to make calls too.

X's help page today has no hedge in it. Two consecutive lines: all accounts are able to make calls, all accounts are able to receive calls. There is no Premium tier anywhere in the calling documentation.

So if you are looking at a subscription page because a walkthrough told you calls were behind it, close it. If you want to know what X Premium genuinely does include, the X Premium price guide has the current tier split, and calling is not on it.

#How to place an audio or video call

Four taps on mobile:

1. Tap the envelope icon. You land in your messages.
2. Open an existing conversation, or start a new one.
3. Tap the phone icon at the top of the conversation.
4. Choose Audio call or Video call.

Whoever you call gets a notification that you are calling. If they miss it, they get a missed-call notification afterwards.

One Android-specific detail from X's own page, and it explains a lot of "X calls do not work on Android" complaints: on Android you need push notifications enabled to be notified when a call comes in. Without that permission the call is placed and you simply never hear about it.

While a call is running, the controls are what you would expect. On audio: speaker toggle, mute, and the X button to hang up. On video: flip between front and rear camera, speaker toggle, camera off, mute.

#The gate nobody documents in the interface

Here is the part that sends people hunting through settings for an hour.

X's help page states it in one line: to be able to call another user, they must have sent you a Direct Message at least once before.

Not "you must be able to message them." Not "you must follow each other." They must have sent you a message. A conversation where you have messaged them three times and they have never replied does not qualify. Which means the most common reason a phone icon is missing has nothing to do with your settings or theirs, and no amount of toggling will produce it.

The practical consequence: calling on X is a feature for conversations that already exist in both directions. If you need to call somebody who has never messaged you, the sequence is get them to send one message first, then call. Our guide to sending a DM on X covers message requests and who can reach whose inbox, which is the upstream problem.

When the icon is missing and they have messaged you before, work through the other two causes in order: they have turned the calling feature off in Chat settings, or their who-can-call-me setting does not include you.

#Who can call you: four settings and one default

Everything to do with calls lives in Chat settings, not in the main privacy menu. Tap the settings icon in the top right corner of your messages.

Top of that screen is the feature switch itself: audio and video calling on or off. Off means no incoming calls at all, and it is the cleanest answer if calls are not something you want on this account.

Leave it on and you choose who gets through:

X states the default is that you can receive calls from accounts you follow, accounts in your address book if you have previously given X access to it, and, if you belong to a Premium Business or Premium Organization, other members of that same organization.

That last clause is easy to miss and worth a second read if you work somewhere with a badged X presence. Joining a Premium Business adds colleagues to your callable-by list by default, without any action from you.

Verified users is the setting to think about. It sounds like a quality filter. Since verification on X is a paid subscription, in practice it means anyone willing to pay for a checkmark and send you one message, which is not much of a filter. If your inbox is open to strangers, People you follow is the honest version of what most people want.

#Enhanced call privacy, and why the default matters

This is the most consequential thing on the page and the least discussed.

X's help page describes the setting like this: with Enhanced call privacy disabled, which it is by default, once X's servers facilitate the initial setup the call itself is routed peer-to-peer, such that each party's IP address may be visible to the other. If either party has the setting enabled, the call is relayed through X infrastructure and the IP address of any party with the setting enabled is masked.

Unpack that. Peer-to-peer routing is why calls feel quick and cheap to run. It also means the audio and video travels directly between two devices on the internet, and a direct connection between two devices involves both of them knowing where to send packets. An IP address is not your home address, but it is a coarse location and a stable identifier, and there is a cottage industry in extracting them from exactly this kind of connection.

X's fix is to put its own servers in the middle, at the cost of a little latency, and X has shipped it switched off.

To turn it on: tap the envelope icon to go to your messages, then toggle Enhanced call privacy on.

Note the asymmetry, because it is the useful part. The masking protects whoever enabled it, so you do not need the other person's cooperation to protect yourself. One side enabling the setting is enough to route the call through X, but only the enabling party's IP is masked. Turn it on for yourself and stop thinking about it.

If you take calls from people you have not met, from accounts you do not know, or from anyone contacting you about a deal, enable this before the next call rather than after. Same category of hygiene as turning off read receipts: a default that leaks something small and permanent.

#Group calls: real, partial, and not encrypted

Group calling arrived more recently and sits inside group chats rather than as a standalone product.

How it works: open the X app on iOS or x.com in a browser, go to Messages, select a group conversation, and tap the call button at the top right, which looks like a video camera. Everyone in the group is notified that a call has started and joins by pressing Join. In the call you can mute, turn your camera off, share your screen on web only for now, and leave with the X button. The call stays live as long as one participant remains.

Three limits are published, and all three matter:

• iOS and x.com on desktop only. X lists Android support as coming soon.
• Screen sharing is web only. Not available in the mobile app yet.
• Group calls are not yet end-to-end encrypted. X puts that note on the page itself.

That encryption note deserves emphasis, because it is easy to assume the opposite. Chat messages on X are end-to-end encrypted, which is the headline feature of the whole product, and what XChat is covers what that encryption does and does not cover. Group calls are a different system with a different guarantee, and right now the guarantee is weaker. X also frames the whole thing as a first release with more capabilities coming, which is a reasonable thing to take at face value and a bad thing to bet a confidential conversation on.

#Calls not working? The order to check

Work down this list rather than across settings screens at random.

1. Has the other person ever DM'd you? If not, this is your answer and nothing else will fix it.
2. Is calling enabled in your Chat settings? The master switch, in the settings icon at the top right of your messages.
3. Does their who-can-call-me setting include you? You cannot see it, so the test is whether a mutual follower of theirs can call them.
4. On Android, are push notifications on for X? Without them, incoming calls arrive silently.
5. Are you blocked? Blocking cuts the conversation, and therefore the call. How blocking works on X covers what it does and does not reach.
6. Are you on a platform that supports the call type? Group calls on Android do not exist yet, so a group call button you cannot find there is not a bug.

#Bottom line

Calls on X are free, they are decent, and two things about them are badly documented. You cannot call someone who has never messaged you, which is a feature rather than a fault once you know it. And the default routing shows your IP address to the other party, which is fixable in one toggle most people have never seen. Set Enhanced call privacy on, narrow who-can-call-me to people you follow, and treat group calls as convenient rather than confidential until X ships the encryption.

If the reason you are setting up calls is that X has become a real channel for your work, the harder part is being present enough that the conversations start. X-Autopilot drafts posts and replies from a real Chrome browser on your own Mac, so the session cookie never leaves your machine and there is no delegate account or shared cloud IP pool: a lower detection surface than cloud schedulers, though browser-route automation on X remains a gray area rather than a sanctioned path. It does not touch your DMs or your calls. It keeps the top of the funnel moving so the inbox has something in it.