Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones
Hey HN, Henry and Roman here - we've been building a cross-platform framework for deploying LLMs, VLMs, Embedding Models and TTS models locally on smartphones. Ollama enables deploying LLMs models locally on laptops and edge severs, Cactus enables deploying on phones. Deploying directly on phones facilitates building AI apps and agents capable of phone use without breaking privacy, supports real-time inference with no latency, we have seen personalised RAG pipelines for users and more. Apple and Google actively went into local AI models recently with the launch of Apple Foundation Frameworks…
Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones launched on July 10, 2025 with 231 votes, #143 of 9,224 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Cactus is a cross-platform framework that lets developers run large language models, vision models, embedding models, and text-to-speech directly on smartphones. It works with Flutter, React Native, and Kotlin, supporting any GGUF model. Running AI locally on phones enables privacy-preserving applications with no latency and faster inference. It fills a gap left by platform-specific solutions like Apple Foundation Frameworks and Google AI Edge, offering developers flexibility to build personalized AI features without relying on cloud services.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Quantization, kernels, runtime and inference engine for mobiles, wearables, smart home and robots. - GitHub - cactus-compute/cactus: Quantization, kernels, runtime and inference engine for mobiles, wearables, smart home and robots.
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, Henry and Roman here - we've been building a cross-platform framework for deploying LLMs, VLMs, Embedding Models and TTS models locally on smartphones. Ollama enables deploying LLMs models locally on laptops and edge severs, Cactus enables deploying on phones. Deploying directly on phones facilitates building…
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