BastionChat vs Aside

Private AI that runs entirely on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. Chat with your documents, get instant summaries and ask out loud, with no internet, no account and no data collected. ASK YOUR DOCUMENTS Import a contract, a manual, a report or a scanned PDF. Ask in your own words and get a clear answer, with the source one tap away, so you can check it instead of trusting it. Small documents are read in full; large libraries are searched. INSTANT SUMMARIES Turn a long file into the key points: parties, dates, amounts, conditions. JUST ASK OUT LOUD Voice mode with on-device speech recognition. Nothing is uploaded. UNDERSTANDS IMAGES Ask about photos and screenshots with vision models. WORKS OFFLINE On a plane, at sea, underground: the AI model lives on your device, so it keeps working. In airplane mode, web tools are simply not offered. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account. No tracking. Your documents and conversations never leave the device. Apple's privacy label: Data Not Collected. Lock the app with Face ID using iOS's built-in app protection. YOUR CHOICE OF MODEL A curated catalog of open models (Qwen, Gemma, Phi, LFM and more) sized for your device: fast ones on iPhone, larger ones on iPad and Mac. Or import any GGUF model from Hugging Face. FOR POWER USERS Adjustable thinking (Off, Short, Full), calculator, optional web search, MCP tools for agent workflows. ONE PURCHASE No subscription, no usage limits, Family Sharing. Download a model once, then everything runs locally. Requires iOS 18 or later. Larger models need more memory; the app recommends what fits your device.

Aside is a private, on-device AI chat for iPhone. It runs entirely on your phone using Apple Intelligence — your conversations never leave the device. No account. No cloud. No telemetry. Works in airplane mode. WHY ASIDE For the questions you wouldn't post to a server. Health. Legal drafts. Personal journal. Half-formed ideas. Aside answers, and forgets nothing — because it never had a reason to remember anywhere but on your phone. WHAT YOU CAN DO • Chat in clean Markdown — bold, lists, headings, code blocks • Attach photos — on-device Vision extracts text and context first • Dictate with the mic — speech recognition is local too • Save every conversation on-device, organized in a clean sidebar • Search across every message you've ever written • Share or copy any chat as Markdown • Long-press a message to copy, regenerate, or delete • Pick a persona (concise, friendly tutor, brutally honest, code-focused — or write your own) • Adjust text size, toggle Markdown rendering, control haptics 100% PRIVATE Aside makes zero outbound network requests during a chat. Verify with a packet sniffer. The model lives on your iPhone's Neural Engine; the conversation stays where it started. REQUIREMENTS • iPhone 15 Pro or later, OR iPhone 16 / 17 (any model) • iOS 26 or later • Apple Intelligence enabled in Settings ONE-TIME PURCHASE $9.99. No subscription. No in-app purchase. No upsell.