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Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone (github.com)

124 points by ali_chherawalla ↗ HN
Your phone has a GPU more powerful than most 2018 laptops. Right now it sits idle while you pay monthly subscriptions to run AI on someone else's server, sending your conversations, your photos, your voice to companies whose privacy policy you've never read. Off Grid is an open-source app that puts that hardware to work. Text generation, image generation, vision AI, voice transcription — all running on your phone, all offline, nothing ever uploaded.

That means you can use AI on a flight with no wifi. In a country with internet censorship. In a hospital where cloud services are a compliance nightmare. Or just because you'd rather not have your journal entries sitting in someone's training data.

The tech: llama.cpp for text (15-30 tok/s, any GGUF model), Stable Diffusion for images (5-10s on Snapdragon NPU), Whisper for voice, SmolVLM/Qwen3-VL for vision. Hardware-accelerated on both Android (QNN, OpenCL) and iOS (Core ML, ANE, Metal).

MIT licensed. Android APK on GitHub Releases. Build from source for iOS.

29 comments

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bkmeneguello
Very nice, but I'm gonna wait for the f-droid build.
saratogacx
I've found using Obtanium to be a great tool for tracking github android apps that aren't listed on repos like f-droid
derac
I haven't run it, but I looked through the repo. It looks very well thought out, the UI is nice. I appreciate the ethos behind the local/offline design. Cheers.
snicky
GitHub Releases link is broken.

The dash in "off-grid" is missing.

vachina
Ok it lists the instruction to build for iOS, but how to sideload?
resonious
On my Samsung phone it doesn't move the screen up to make room for the keyboard so I can't see what I'm typing.

Really awesome idea though. I want this to work.

sangaya
Putting the power and the data of the users in the hands of the users themselves! Well done. Getting it setup was easy. Wish the app recognized the keyboard and realized when it was displayed so the bottom menu and chat box weren't hidden under it.
nine_k
Is there something similar, but geared towards a Linux desktop / laptop? I suppose this would be relatively easy to adapt.
ali_chherawalla
LM Studio solves for it pretty well I think. It doesn't do image gen etc though
jeroenhd
If you have enough (V)RAM you can set up Ollama + any of the generation tools here (https://docs.openwebui.com/category/create--edit-images) and hook them into OpenWebUI to get something pretty close to what you'd get on a cloud AI chatbox.

Decently performing models for day to day use cases use at least 6GB VRAM each, though, and even then they're not coming very close to what the cheapest AI websites offer.

chr15m
This rules. Godspeed!
noodletheworld
Nice idea, but isnt this kind of daft?

There are basically no useful models that run on phone hardware.

> Results vary by model size and quantization.

I bet they do.

Look, if you cant run models on your desktop, theres no way in hell they run on your phone.

The problem with all of these self hosting solutions is that the actual models you can run on them aren't any good.

Not like, “chat gpt a year ago” not good.

Like, “its a potato pop pop” no good.

Unsloth has a good guide on running qwen3 (1), and the tldr is basically, its not really good unless you run a big version.

The iphone 17 pro has 12GB of ram.

That is, to be fair, enough to run some small stable diffusion models, but it isnt enough to run run a decent quant of qwen3.

You need about 64 GB for that.

So… i dunno. This feels like a bunch of empty promises; yes, technically it can run some models, but how useful is it actually?

Self hosting needs next gen hardware.

This gen of desktop hardware isnt good enough, even remotely, to compare to server api options.

Running on mobile devices is probably still a way away.

(1) - https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3-how-to-run-and-fine-tun...

ucguy4u
tried this on pixel 9, interesting stuff
ruthlesssavage
Game-changer.Just downloaded it and wow,this is the future. It’s incredible to have this much power fully offline. No lag, no privacy concerns, just pure utility. I’ve been playing with the vision AI all morning and it hasn't crashed once. 10/10. I have also used other GitHub projects but this feels premium, faster and optimised. Thank you for this!
romperstomper
Are there any nice TTS models? It could be handy to have them as well.
jeroenhd
Looks useful, though something went wrong doing NPU image generation on my phone.

Reminds me a lot of https://github.com/google-ai-edge/gallery which is a proof-of-concept app by Google themselves for their AI libraries. However, your app supports more and larger models without having to manually import anything, which is very useful.

willx86
I like it, I have a couple minor things (android)

Markdown rendering would be great Letting me download a model, wait for it, then. tell me I can't run it safely in my ram feels like it could've told me at the beginning

Bar that nice! Was it annoying integrating with apples AI stuff?

isawczuk
I was looking for something like this. Are you open for contributions?
Swauzie
I gave it a try on Graphene OS: I downloaded models 1st, then blocked Network Accesses. The Apps works fine for text generation, but not for image generation: it needs network access... I did not search where it needs to go.