I built an on-device LLM based chatbot for iPhones
I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works reasonably well on recent-ish (~3 year old) iPhones, iPads and Macs. It was launched on the App Store yesterday[1] and Product Hunt today[2]. It seems to be reasonably ok at natural language interactions, but given its size, does pretty badly at coding and reasoning. Also, it…
I built an on-device LLM based chatbot for iPhones launched on June 6, 2023 with 20 votes, #1,560 of 4,655 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This is an on-device chatbot app for iPhones, iPads, and Macs built with SwiftUI that runs a quantized language model locally without internet. It uses a fine-tuned 3-billion-parameter model optimized for natural language conversations and performs adequately on recent devices from around three years old. The app handles general Q&A reasonably well but struggles with coding and reasoning tasks due to its smaller size, and may occasionally produce inconsistent responses in extended conversations.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
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I built a free in-browser Llama 3 chatbot powered by WebGPU2024 · github.com · ▲547I spent the last few days building out a nicer ChatGPT-like interface to use Mistral 7B and Llama 3 fully within a browser (no deps and installs). I’ve used the WebLLM project by MLC AI for a while to interact with LLMs in the browser when handling sensitive data but I found their UI quite lacking for serious use so I built a much better interface around WebLLM. I’ve been using it as a therapist and coach. And it’s wonderful knowing that my personal information never leaves my local computer. Should work on Desktop with Chrome or Edge. Other browsers are adding WebGPU support as well - see…
SwiftAI – open-source library to easily build LLM features on iOS/macOS2025 · github.com · ▲74We built SwiftAI, an open-source Swift library that lets you use Apple’s on-device LLMs when available (Apple opened access in June), and fall back to a cloud model when they aren’t available — all without duplicating code. SwiftAI gives you: - A single, model-agnostic API - An agent/tool loop - Strongly-typed structured outputs - Optional chat state Backstory: We started experimenting with Apple’s local models because they’re free (no API calls), private, and work offline. The problem: not all devices support them (older iPhones, Apple Intelligence disabled, low battery, etc.). That…
WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations2023 · github.com · ▲124Hello HN! I've been thinking about the idea of a LLM thats a clone of me - instead of generating replies to be a helpful assistant, it generates replies that are exactly like mine. The concept's appeared in fiction numerous times (the talking paintings in Harry Potter that mimic the person painted, the clones in The Prestige), and I think with LLMs, there might actually be a possibility of us doing something like this! I've just released a fork of the facebookresearch/llama-recipes which allows you to fine-tune a Llama model on your personal WhatsApp conversations. This adaptation can…
- IBIn-Browser Graph RAG with Kuzu-WASM and WebLLM2025 · blog.kuzudb.com · ▲158
We show the potential of modern, embedded graph databases in the browser by demonstrating a fully in-browser chatbot that can perform Graph RAG using Kuzu (the graph database we're building) and WebLLM, a popular in-browser inference engine for LLMs. The post retrieves from the graph via a Text-to-Cypher pipeline that translates a user question into a Cypher query, and the LLM uses the retrieved results to synthesize a response. As LLMs get better, and WebGPU and Wasm64 become more widely adopted, we expect to be able to do more and more in the browser in combination with LLMs, so a lot of…

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