PocketPal AI

A private AI assistant that runs entirely on your phone.

Chat with language models, give them a voice, and let them use tools — all on-device. No account, no cloud, no internet required.

pocketpal.dev · Get the app · Leaderboard · PalsHub · Discussions

Why PocketPal AI?

Most AI apps are a thin window onto someone else's server — every message you type gets shipped off, logged, and analyzed somewhere you can't see. PocketPal flips that around: the AI lives on your phone, and your conversations never leave it.

• 🔒 Private by default — every prompt, response, and document stays on your device. Nothing is uploaded or stored on external servers.
• ✈️ Works offline — download a model once and it just works, with no connection and no account. On a plane, on a trail, anywhere.
• 📱 Runs on hardware you already own — real language models, voices, and tools, tuned to make the most of your phone's CPU, GPU, and NPU.
• 🆓 Free and open source — no subscription, no "pro" tier to unlock the AI. MIT-licensed and built in the open.

Privacy note: The only data that ever leaves your device is what you explicitly choose to share — benchmark results (if you opt into the leaderboard) and feedback you submit through the app.

Contents

• Features
• Get the app
• How it works
• Using the app
• For developers
• Contributing
• Roadmap
• Community & support
• License

Features

• 🧠 On-device chat — run GGUF language models (Gemma, Qwen, Phi, Llama, and more) fully offline.
• 🗣️ Text-to-speech — give your assistant a voice with on-device neural TTS (Kokoro and other engines), no cloud calls.
• 🎭 Pals — create personalized assistants with their own model, system prompt, and personality (Assistant and Roleplay types).
• 🛍️ PalsHub — discover and install community Pals, including premium ones via in-app checkout.
• 🛠️ Talents & tools — let capable Pals call built-in tools (calculator, date/time, rich HTML rendering) inside a tool-use loop.
• 📥 Hugging Face integration — search and download GGUF models, including gated ones, directly from the HF Hub with your access token.
• 📊 Benchmarking — measure tokens/sec and memory, and optionally compare on the AI Phone Leaderboard.
• ⚡ Hardware acceleration — CPU, GPU (Metal on iOS, OpenCL/Adreno on Android), and NPU (Qualcomm Hexagon) inference paths, with graceful fallback.
• 🌍 Localized — available in 11 languages, on phones and tablets, including full iPad support.

Get the app

Platform
iOS / iPadOS
Android

Three steps to your first chat:

1. Install PocketPal from the App Store or Google Play.
2. Download a model — tap the menu (☰) → Models, pick one that fits your phone, and download (or add one from Hugging Face).
3. Load it and start chatting — that's it, you're running AI fully offline.

How it works

You don't need to know any of this to use PocketPal — but if you're curious how a phone runs real AI offline, here's the short version.

PocketPal is a four-layer stack, from the silicon up to the chat UI. Each layer has one job, and the dependency direction is strictly top-down — the JS app talks to native bridges, bridges talk to inference engines, engines target hardware backends.

Using the app

📥 Download & load a model

1. Open the app and tap the Menu (☰), then go to Models.
2. Pick a model from the list and tap Download, or tap + to add one from Hugging Face or local storage.
3. From Hugging Face, search GGUF models and choose a quantization that fits your device's memory and storage — download now or bookmark for later.
4. After downloading, tap Load (or use the chevron icon left of the chat input to load right from the chat screen).

💬 Chat

1. Make sure a model is loaded.
2. Open the Chat page and start talking.
3. The screen stays awake during inference and deactivates when idle.
4. Copy a full response with the copy icon, or long-press a paragraph to copy just that.
5. Edit any of your messages with a long-press — the AI regenerates from your change. Hit retry for a fresh answer, optionally with a different model.

🎭 Pals & PalsHub

Create personalized assistants:

• Assistant Pal — pick a default model, set a system prompt (write it yourself or have the app generate one), and customize the chat input color.
• Roleplay Pal — everything above, plus location, the AI's role, and other contextual parameters.

Switch personas with the Pal picker on the chat page. Browse PalsHub in-app to discover community Pals, including premium ones via in-app checkout (US iOS & Android).

Creating a cocktail-recipe assistant

📊 Benchmark your device

1. Open the Benchmark page.
2. Run performance tests to compare speed and efficiency across models.
3. Review tokens/sec and memory usage.
4. Optionally share your results to the AI Phone Leaderboard.

🔑 Set up a Hugging Face token (for gated models)

1. Create an access token in your Hugging Face account (docs).
2. In PocketPal, go to Settings → Set Token, paste it, and save.

💌 Send feedback

Go to App Info → "Sharing your thoughts", type your feedback — feature requests, suggestions, anything — and submit.

For developers

PocketPal is a standard React Native app. If you can build a React Native project, you can build PocketPal.

Prerequisites

• Node.js — version is pinned in .nvmrc (currently 22.21.0); run nvm use to match it. Older Node will fail the engines check.
• Yarn 1 (Classic) — packageManager is pinned to yarn@1.22.22.
• Xcode + CocoaPods, and Ruby + Bundler (for iOS / Fastlane tooling).
• Android Studio + Android SDK/NDK.

See the React Native environment setup for platform details.

Clone, install & run

git clone https://github.com/a-ghorbani/pocketpal-ai
cd pocketpal-ai

nvm use                       # match the pinned Node version
yarn install                  # install JS dependencies
(cd ios && pod install)       # iOS only

yarn start                    # Metro bundler
yarn ios                      # build + run on iOS simulator
yarn android                  # build + run on Android emulator

Core on-device chat works without any backend keys; only PalsHub/auth features need additional configuration.

Native-change rule: if you change package.json, a native module, ios/, android/, the Podfile, or build.gradle, re-run pod install and rebuild both platforms — a JS reload won't pick up native changes.

Quality gates

yarn lint           # ESLint
yarn typecheck      # tsc --noEmit
yarn test           # Jest
yarn l10n:validate  # validate locale JSON (placeholders, integrity)

Run yarn lint && yarn typecheck && yarn test before opening a PR. Commits are validated by Commitlint (Conventional Commits) via a Husky hook.

src/
├── screens/        # Chat, Models, Pals, Benchmark, Settings, About, …
├── components/     # Reusable UI
├── store/          # MobX stores (Model, ChatSession, Pal, TTS, HF, Benchmark, …)
├── services/
│   ├── agent/      # AgentRunner — the chat / tool loop
│   ├── talents/    # Tool engines + registries
│   ├── tts/        # TTS engines (kokoro, kitten, supertonic, system)
│   ├── palshub/    # PalsHub marketplace integration
│   └── downloads/  # Model download manager
├── database/       # WatermelonDB schema, models, migrations
├── repositories/   # Data-access layer over the DB
├── locales/        # i18n JSON + lazy loader (index.ts is the registry)
└── hooks/  api/  theme/  utils/  config/  specs/

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — bug reports, fixes, features, translations, and docs all help.

1. Fork and branch: git checkout -b feature/your-feature-name
2. Make your changes; run on a device/emulator (yarn ios / yarn android). Re-run pod install + rebuild if you touched native code.
3. Gate locally: yarn lint && yarn typecheck && yarn test
4. Commit with Conventional Commits: git commit -m "feat: add new talent"
5. Push and open a pull request.

Please read the Contributing Guidelines and Code of Conduct first. Want to translate PocketPal into your language? Join us on Weblate.

Roadmap

• Tool use expansion — grow the Talents catalog and deepen the agentic loop so Pals can do more, fully on-device.

Have an idea or found a bug? Open an issue or start a discussion.

Community & support

• 💬 Questions & ideas — GitHub Discussions
• 🐛 Bugs & requests — GitHub Issues
• 🌐 Website — pocketpal.dev
• ❤️ Support development — PocketPal is free and ad-free; sponsoring helps keep it that way.

License

Licensed under the MIT License.

Acknowledgements

PocketPal AI stands on the shoulders of the open-source community, including:

• llama.cpp — efficient on-device LLM inference.
• llama.rn — llama.cpp bindings for React Native.
• react-native-speech — React Native TTS bridge powering on-device voices.
• ONNX Runtime — cross-platform inference engine powering on-device TTS.
• React Native, MobX, React Native Paper, React Navigation, WatermelonDB, and many other open-source libraries that make this project possible.