Grok - AI Assistant 1.2.16

Grok is xAI's AI assistant for Android, and its distinguishing feature is access to live posts on X rather than a fixed training set.

The APK here is version 1.2.16, 63 MB, and the app itself is free to install.

Download the Grok APK - or read the two sections below first, because most people should not be sideloading this at all.

Should you install the APK, or use Google Play?

Grok is on Google Play, and if Play works on your phone that is the better route. Updates arrive automatically and you skip the verification steps entirely.

Sideloading the APK makes sense in four situations.

• Play is not available where you are, or the app is not listed in your country's store.
• Your device has no Play Services. Recent Huawei handsets and a lot of budget devices ship without them.
• You need a specific version, either newer than the staged rollout has reached you or older because a recent build broke something.
• You are setting up a device offline, or installing on several phones from one downloaded file.

If none of those describe you, open Play and search for Grok. That is genuinely the better answer, and any download page that will not tell you so is selling something.

What the free tier actually includes

The app costs nothing to install and you can use it without paying, but "free" has limits worth knowing before you commit.

The free tier gives you conversations, image understanding and web-connected answers, with a cap on how many messages and image generations you get in a given window. Hit the cap and you wait, or you upgrade.

Paid tiers, sold through xAI or bundled with an X subscription, raise those limits and give earlier access to newer models. Nothing on this page requires them.

You will need an account to sign in. There is no anonymous mode, so an email address or an existing X login is the minimum entry price.

Verify the file before you install it

This matters more for an AI app than for most, because a fake build asking for your X credentials is a credible attack rather than a hypothetical one.

1. Check the package name after downloading. The genuine app is published by xAI, and a package name that does not match the developer is the clearest single warning sign.
2. Run the file through our APK Checker, which reads the package name, version, signing certificate and requested permissions in your browser without installing anything.
3. Read the permission list. An assistant needs network access, and it may ask for microphone and camera for voice and image input. It has no business requesting SMS or call logs.
4. Enable installation from unknown sources only for the browser or file manager you are installing from, then turn it back off.

The file here is the unmodified official build, mirrored from EU and US servers and scanned before listing. Nothing is repackaged and nothing is bundled with it.

What it does well

The live X connection is the real differentiator. Ask about something happening this hour and Grok answers from posts rather than from a summary of the past.

That makes it genuinely better than the alternatives for breaking news, sport in progress, and any question where the answer is a conversation rather than a fact.

Beyond that it does what the others do: long-form writing, coding help, image understanding, general questions. The interface is plain and quick, which suits a phone.

Its personality is deliberately less filtered than most assistants, which some people prefer and which has produced public controversy more than once. Worth knowing before you choose it as your everyday assistant.

How it compares to the other Android AI apps

ChatGPT is the default choice and the strongest all-rounder, with the largest free tier of the major assistants and better long-document handling.

DeepSeek is the one to install for coding and step-by-step reasoning, and it costs nothing.

Perplexity answers research questions with sources you can click, which matters if you need to check the answer rather than trust it.

Monica AI puts several models behind one interface, and Vibe, from Mistral, is the European option.

Grok's case against all of them is the same single sentence: it reads X live and they do not. If that is not what you need, one of the others is probably a better daily driver.

Installing it

Download the APK, allow installs from your browser when Android prompts, tap the file, and confirm. It takes under a minute on a modern handset.

At 63 MB it is a substantial download on mobile data. Worth doing on wifi, and worth checking you have room, since the installed app grows as it caches conversations.

Updates do not arrive automatically with a sideloaded APK. You either return here for a newer file or install the Play version once it becomes available to you.

More Android apps are in our Android APK section, including VLC and CapCut.

Quick questions

Download the Grok APK 1.2.16 and see how it handles your questions, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.