Small apps, built close to the metal.

Leap Studio makes iOS apps that do one thing well. A bedside clock that dims itself. A guide through a baby’s first year. An assistant that reads your own documents. Each one is narrow on purpose.

The technical position is the interesting part. Phones can now run useful language models on their own hardware. That changes what these apps need: an assistant that reads your contracts and case notes does not need a server, a subscription to an inference provider, or a privacy policy full of hedges. It needs a good enough model and somewhere to put it. All of it runs on the device.

This turns the usual arrangement around. Most software asks you to trust a promise about what happens to your data on someone else’s computer. These apps do not need that promise, because your data never gets to anyone else’s computer. Some of them make no network requests at all.

We try to be precise rather than absolute about it. One app does use analytics, and one sends generated text to a voice service. Both are named, in detail, in that app’s own privacy policy — rather than rounded down to nothing in a marketing claim. Where something leaves your device, you should be able to find out what, to whom, and why, in under a minute.

If you are evaluating one of these apps for an organisation, the trust page has the compliance pack, published rather than gated.