Comparison

Voicemail.app vs lodestar

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side β€” with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Voicemail.app

This AI-powered assistant answers your missed calls with a natural voice and provides instant, transcribed summaries. Customize greetings and manage your call history easily.

Highlights
  • AI-powered call answering
  • Natural conversational voice
  • Instant call summaries
  • Voicemail transcription
  • Personalized greetings
  • Intuitive call history management
Features
Read full description

Voicemail.app replaces your carrier's traditional voicemail with a smart, AI-powered personal assistant. Instead of a generic voicemail greeting that causes people to hang up, your assistant answers missed calls on your behalf with a natural, conversational voice. Never miss a crucial message again. After each call, you'll receive a notification with a detailed summary. No more sifting through voicemailsβ€”just a quick, easy-to-read transcription right in the app. Features: - Personalized Greetings: Customize your assistant's voice and greeting to reflect your style. - Instant Summaries: Get a summary of every missed call in the app, so you can quickly decide if you need to call back. - Simple Setup: Easily configure your settings and manage your call history from one intuitive app. Say goodbye to outdated voicemail and say hello to the future of managing your calls. Download Voicemail.app today and let your personal AI assistant take over.

About

lodestar

Features
Read full description

lodestar is the remote for the media stack you already run, connected straight from your iPhone to your own servers. Radarr and Sonarr. Prowlarr and Bazarr. Overseerr and Jellyseerr. Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, and Tautulli. NZBGet, SABnzbd, qBittorrent, Transmission, and Deluge. LazyLibrarian and Audiobookshelf for books. One native app for all of it. Deep, not shallow. Each service gets its own screens for browsing and control, not a status widget. Browse and edit your Radarr and Sonarr libraries, add movies and series with root folder, quality profile, and tags, run interactive release searches and push the exact release you want to your download client, manage queues with blocklisting, and check history, missing, and upcoming. Download clients get real control too: reorder and prioritize queues, pause and resume globally or per item, set speed limits, and dig into per-torrent trackers, peers, and file priorities. Torrents included. qBittorrent, Transmission, and Deluge are first-class modules alongside usenet, not afterthoughts. Requests, subtitles, and indexers. Approve what your household asks for through Overseerr or Jellyseerr. Chase down missing subtitles in Bazarr. See which indexer is failing in Prowlarr, which is usually the real answer to "why did nothing download". Your media server too. See who is watching what right now on Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby, stop a stream, and read the viewing history and stats Tautulli keeps. It tells you what is stuck. One screen collects every failed grab, blocked import, stalled download, and health warning across the whole stack, with the fix one tap away. One calendar for everything. Upcoming movies and episodes from every Radarr and Sonarr instance, merged into month and agenda views. Built for real setups. Unlimited profiles for multi-instance stacks (4K and 1080p Radarr side by side), instant profile switching, LAN and WAN addresses with automatic fallback, custom headers, and self-signed certificate support. The connection wizard validates live and tells you exactly why a connection failed. Native and fast. Built in SwiftUI for iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 and up, so it runs on the devices newer apps have already dropped. Full dark mode, haptics, designed empty states, and home screen widgets. No web views pretending to be an app. Your servers stay yours. On your own network, lodestar talks directly from your iPhone to your servers: no account, and nothing sent to us. Optional remote access adds a lodestar account and a relay we run, so the app can reach your servers from anywhere through an agent you install at home. The relay carries traffic it cannot read. API keys live in the iOS Keychain and go only to your servers, or sealed to your own agent when remote access is on. Three ways to use it. The agent and its web app on your own network are free. The iOS app's free tier is one profile with up to two services, direct connections, full functionality. lodestar lifetime, one payment, unlocks the app for good, unlimited profiles and services, and includes thirty days of remote access. lodestar monthly is remote access: reach your servers from anywhere through our relay and the web app, cancel any time in Settings. lodestar is a remote control for servers you already operate. It downloads nothing itself, requires media server software running on your own hardware, and is for content you have the right to. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://lodestar.i8l.tech/privacy Support: https://lodestar.i8l.tech/support

Screenshots

Voicemail.app4 screens
lodestar4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Voicemail.app at none against lodestar's 2. Voicemail.app also leads on iOS requirement (15.1 vs 17.0). lodestar's advantage is update cadence (every 5 days vs every 3 months). On price, ads and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price Β· Rating Β· Positive reviews Β· Number of ratings Β· Update frequency Β· Ads Β· In-app purchases Β· Monetization Β· Best chart rank Β· Devices Β· Requires iOS

CostPrice Β· In-app purchases Β· Ads Β· Monetization

Both are free to download. lodestar sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. Voicemail.app asks for nothing beyond the download.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Voicemail.app ships an update every 3 months, lodestar every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on October 24, 2026 and October 18, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard3 real differences Β· 5 level
Voicemail.app versus lodestar: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterVoicemail.applodestar
PriceFreeFree
Positive reviews0.0% of reviewsβ€”
Update frequencyEvery 3 monthsEvery 5 days β€” better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNo β€” betterYes
MonetizationFreeβ€”
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPod β€” betteriPhone, iPad
Requires iOS15.1 β€” better17.0
Further details β€” not scored
Size28 MB15 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperVoicemail.app LLCJonathan Poeder

In-app purchases

None

Voicemail.app

No in-app purchases

2 purchases

lodestar

Subscriptions1
  • lodestar monthly7 Days trial$2.991 Month
One-time1
  • lodestar lifetime$19.99

Questions

Is Voicemail.app free?
Voicemail.app is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is lodestar free?
lodestar is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do Voicemail.app or lodestar have ads?
Neither Voicemail.app nor lodestar shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Voicemail.app or lodestar?
Voicemail.app ships an update every 3 months, and lodestar every 5 days. Most recently, Voicemail.app was updated on October 24, 2026 and lodestar on October 18, 2026.

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