Palapa! vs mycellm
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Palapa!
This app transforms your Mac's idle resources into intelligence and distributed storage. Access AI models across your devices, contribute to a shared network, and integrate AI into your projects with flexible privacy controls.
- Contribute Mac compute power to a shared network
- Access AI models from iPhone and iPad
- Run AI models locally on Mac
- Serve AI model requests to other members
- Integrate AI into projects via API
- Sync files across devices
- Choose privacy levels for inference
Read full descriptionHide full description
Palapa turns idle compute and unused storage into intelligence and a drive that lives everywhere. Palapa lets you contribute your Mac’s unused computing power to a shared network and access its AI models from your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. HOW IT WORKS Palapa operates in three ways, and you can use any combination that fits your device: • AI Server — Run AI models directly on your Mac and serve requests from other members when you’re not using it. • Companion App — Manage your account, monitor your devices, and access the network from your iPhone or iPad without running inference locally. • Developer Access — Point any OpenAI-compatible tool or app directly at Palapa’s API to integrate large-scale AI inference into your own projects. WHAT YOU CAN DO • Browse your Drive and sync files across iPhone, iPad, and Mac • Run AI models locally on your Mac and contribute spare capacity to the network • Access models larger than your device could run on its own • Choose your privacy level for every request: keep inference entirely on your own devices, route only to trusted friends, or open it to the wider network • Connect with friends and groups and message within the app • Use Palapa as a drop-in replacement for other AI API providers in your own tools and workflows PRIVACY BY DESIGN You control where your requests are processed. Self-only mode keeps everything on your own devices. Friends mode routes only to people you trust. Open mode reaches the full network for the widest model selection. Nodes don’t store your data beyond the life of each request. BUILT FOR EVERYONE Whether you’re an individual developer looking to escape per-request API costs, part of the open-source AI community, or have a Mac with spare capacity, Palapa gives you a way to put spare compute to work and get more out of AI in return.
mycellm
Read full descriptionHide full description
Mycellm turns your iPhone or iPad into a node on a distributed AI inference network. Run open LLMs on your own hardware — no account, no telemetry, no cloud middleman. Use it three ways, and own every layer. LOCAL — ON YOUR DEVICE Load a model and run inference entirely on-device. Fully offline, airplane-mode friendly. On-device Privacy Guard scans prompts for secrets before anything hits the wire. TRUSTED DEVICES — YOUR OWN NETWORK Point your phone at a node you trust — your Mac Studio, your iPad Pro, your homelab — and run models far bigger than any single device could hold. Your phone stays light; a machine you own does the heavy lifting. No cloud. PUBLIC — THE FREE NETWORK Tap the public mycellm net: open models served by GPUs worldwide. Earn credits by serving spare compute, spend them to run larger models. Peer-to-peer, no subscription. FEDERATE Stand up your own network with its own trust policy and credit ledger, mint invite tokens, and bridge trusted networks with cross-network routing. You decide membership, models, and data flow. UNLEASH THE iPAD PRO An iPad Pro (M4/M5) is a serious AI machine that sits idle most of the day. Put it to work: more unified memory runs larger models, Metal delivers 30+ tok/s on multi-billion-parameter models. Serve your iPhone, your team, or the network — first-class on any device that runs a model. FOR PEOPLE WHO RUN THEIR OWN STACK - Serves the same chat-completions REST API your tools already speak — point curl, Claude Code, or your own clients at your device. - Vision models: attach an image and ask, on-device. - Live dashboard: tok/s, credits, peers, node health. - Auto hardware-fit: picks quantizations that match your RAM. - Open source, Apache 2.0. Audit it, fork it, run it. No black boxes, no lock-in. It's BitTorrent for LLMs — every node both uses the network and makes it stronger. Full docs and use cases at mycellm.dev. Bring your own models, keep your data, and run AI on your terms.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: mycellm at every 9 days against Palapa!'s every 3 weeks. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Palapa! ships an update every 3 weeks, mycellm every 9 days. The most recent releases landed on November 3, 2026 and October 31, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Palapa! | mycellm |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (8 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 8 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 3 weeks | Every 9 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 115 MB | 42 MB |
| Age rating | 9+ | 12+ |
| Developer | Palapa, Inc. | Dodecki Labs |
In-app purchases
Palapa!
No in-app purchases
mycellm
No in-app purchases









