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Hey everyone,

My lifelong best friend and I have been building things together forever, and our latest project is finally out. We call our little studio Twin Ember, and we just launched our first app beta: Forest Companion.

The project actually started because we both loved the idea of AI companions but hated how “uncanny” and clinical they felt. Most of them try so hard to be human that they just end up being creepy.

As fans of cozy games like stardew valley, we decided to pivot. Instead of a “virtual human,” we built a pixel-art forest where you talk to creatures that actually feel like characters.

How it works: You’ve got a home screen with Fern the Wizard, and you can swipe through different forest scenes to talk to characters like Hopper the Bunny or Rustle the Fox.

What we’re looking for: We’re really trying to get the “vibe” right before we go any further. We’d love your help with:

• The Personalities: Do they feel like “characters,” or can you still see the AI behind the curtain?
• The Features: We’re debating adding things like customization, changing the environment. What would make you want to visit the forest every day?
• The UI: We went for a swiping mechanic to keep it feeling like an exploration. Does it feel smooth?

The Subscription Question ($5/mo?): Since we’re just two guys paying for AI server costs out of pocket, we’re looking at a $5/month sub for unlimited chats. We really want to be fair here—does that feel reasonable for a cozy app? Would you prefer a “Lifetime” one-time buy instead? We’re totally open to ideas on how to make this sustainable without it being annoying.

The app is Forest Companion on the App Store. ‎Forest Companion App – App Store

If you have a minute to check it out and let us know what you think, it would mean the world to us. We’ll be in the comments all day to chat and take notes!

— The Twin Ember team

https://reddit.com/link/1r44b9s/video/5xd1j6lzgcjg1/player

https://reddit.com/link/1r32vf8/video/1uq52gevc4jg1/player

Every time you use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, your conversations are sent to servers you don’t control. Your questions about health, finances, relationships, work problems — all of it sitting in someone’s database, training their next model.

I wanted AI without the surveillance tax. So I built LocalLLM – an Android & iOS app that downloads an AI model once, then runs 100% on your phone. After that first download, you can turn on airplane mode and chat forever.

What it actually does:

• Chat with AI models that rival early ChatGPT — completely offline
• Analyze photos and documents with your camera — no Google Lens needed
• Generate images from text — no Midjourney/DALL-E account required
• Voice-to-text that runs on-device — no Google speech services
• Passphrase lock for sensitive conversations
• Offloads to GPU where possible to increase performance

What it doesn’t do:

• No accounts. No sign-up. No email.
• No analytics, tracking, or telemetry. Zero.
• No ads. No subscription. No in-app purchases.
• No network requests after you download a model. None.

The only time it touches the internet is to download models from Hugging Face. After that, it’s yours. Airplane mode works perfectly.

Works on most phones with 6GB+ RAM. Flagships run it really well. You can start with as small as 80MB for a model 🙂

It’s fully open source (MIT): https://github.com/alichherawalla/offline-mobile-llm-manager

APK available in the repo if you want to skip building from source.

For iOS as of now you’ll need to actually run it locally and sideload it. If there is enough interest I’ll publish to the app store.

Image gen takes about 6 seconds on iOS, and with NPU ~12 seconds on Android including the time to enhance the prompt.

Happy to answer any questions about what’s happening under the hood.