mycellm vs ArcanAI
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side โ with what reviewers say about each.
mycellm
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Mycellm turns your iPhone or iPad into a node on a distributed AI inference network. Run open LLMs on your own hardware โ no account, no telemetry, no cloud middleman. Use it three ways, and own every layer. LOCAL โ 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 โ YOUR OWN NETWORK Point your phone at a node you trust โ your Mac Studio, your iPad Pro, your homelab โ 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 โ 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 โ 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 โ 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 โ 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.
ArcanAI
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ArcanAI is a private, on-device AI chat app that runs open-source language models entirely on your iPhone or iPad. No accounts. No subscriptions. No cloud. No internet required. Import any GGUF model from Hugging Face and start chatting โ every conversation happens locally, powered by hardware-accelerated inference using Apple's Metal framework. Your messages never leave your device. KEY FEATURES - Run AI models 100% offline โ on a plane, off the grid, anywhere - Import any GGUF model from Hugging Face โ choose the size and capability that fits your device - Store and switch between up to 5 models at once - Analyze documents โ upload PDFs, spreadsheets, text files, CSVs, and more - GPU-accelerated inference for fast, streaming responses - Full conversation history with multiple independent chats - Edit messages and regenerate responses - Customize temperature, max tokens, and system prompts - Beautiful dark UI with markdown-rendered responses - Text-to-speech support SUPPORTED MODEL FAMILIES Llama, Gemma, Mistral, Phi, Qwen, and any ChatML-compatible model. RECOMMENDED STARTER MODELS - Llama 3.2 1B (~570 MB) โ great for older devices - Gemma 2 2B (~1.0 GB) โ balanced performance - Qwen 2.5 3B (~1.5 GB) โ multilingual and code capabilities PRIVACY FIRST Zero data collection. Zero telemetry. Zero crash reporting. Zero cloud sync. Your conversations and model files stay on your device โ always.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is iOS requirement: ArcanAI at 15.1 against mycellm's 17.0. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price ยท Rating ยท Positive reviews ยท Number of ratings ยท Update frequency ยท Ads ยท In-app purchases ยท Monetization ยท Best chart rank ยท Devices ยท Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
| Parameter | mycellm | ArcanAI |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Every 9 days | โ |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod โ better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 15.1 โ better |
| Further details โ not scored | ||
| Size | 42 MB | 37 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Dodecki Labs | Jackson Giordano |
In-app purchases
mycellm
No in-app purchases
ArcanAI
No in-app purchases









