It is now well established that the eXtended Finite Element Method is well suited for evolving discontinuities, in particular for crack growth simulations. In this paper, one wants to preserve the spirit of X-FEM even for time dependent problems: neither remeshing techniques nor field interpolations are needed during the evolution of the interfaces and singularities can be well captured with coarse discretizations compared to the crack size. In this respect, technical aspects are studied in order to ensure the reliability of the method and numerical issues are addressed: tri-dimensional fatigue crack growth, bi-dimensional elastic-plastic fatigue crack growth with closure effect, rolling contact fatigue and dynamic crack growth simulations.