TAG · 18 REVIEWS
On-device AI
Every App Comrade review tagged On-device AI, across every platform.
Drafts is the iPhone capture app that earns its second decade.
Greg Pierce's text-first notebook still opens to a blinking cursor and an empty page. What's grown around that opening screen — actions, JavaScript, on-device AI — is what makes the app feel essential in 2026.
MAY 11, 2026 · EDITOR'S PICK
PictureThis identifies the plant, then asks for your credit card.
The AI is genuinely good at telling a monstera from a philodendron. The seven-day trial and $29.99 annual renewal are doing most of the talking.
MAY 11, 2026
Google Translate is still the one app the rest of the category measures itself against.
More than a hundred languages, a camera that reads street signs in real time, offline packs for the flight, and now a Gemini-shaped brain behind the conversation mode.
MAY 11, 2026
TypeMaster is a one-developer bet that iOS will let an AI keyboard be useful.
A 99-cent AI keyboard from an indie shop runs into the same wall Gboard and SwiftKey did — and then asks who's paying for the tokens.
MAY 11, 2026
Lightroom mobile is still the photo editor every other app is chasing.
Adobe's iPhone-and-iPad app is the rare pro tool that earns its subscription — and Firefly-powered Generative Remove and Lens Blur quietly moved the bar again.
MAY 11, 2026
Samsung's English–Hungarian pack is the hardest job on the Galaxy AI shelf.
On-device translation between English and a heavily agglutinative language. The fact that it works at conversational length at all is the story.
MAY 11, 2026
Samsung's English–Indonesian pack quietly earns its keep on every Galaxy sold in Jakarta.
The on-device translation data behind Galaxy AI's Bahasa Indonesia support. A free, invisible download that turns Live Translate, the Samsung Keyboard, and Interpreter into useful tools for one of Southeast Asia's biggest smartphone markets.
MAY 11, 2026
Samsung's English–Portuguese language pack is plumbing, and that's the compliment.
The on-device translation data behind Galaxy AI's Portuguese support. You don't open it, you don't see it, and that is exactly the right shape for a system component.
MAY 11, 2026
Yahoo Mail keeps the lights on while quietly trimming the welcome mat.
The 2026 app leans hard on AI summaries and Smart Views, then undercuts the pitch by slicing free storage from a terabyte to twenty gigabytes.
MAY 10, 2026
Uber Eats is fastest in cities and most expensive at checkout.
The 2026 cart-assistant push and grocery expansion sharpen the app, but the fee stack and customer-service fog still define the experience.
MAY 10, 2026
Google Meet is the video call app you tolerate, not the one you choose.
Free, dependable, and impossible to escape if you live in Gmail and Calendar — but the iOS app still feels like a thin client to a browser product.
MAY 10, 2026
The Google app is the one Google product Apple users actually open.
Search is the smallest part of it now — Discover, Lens, and AI Overviews have quietly made the side-button shortcut the most-used Google surface on iPhone.
MAY 10, 2026
DuckDuckGo has quietly become a full privacy product, not just a search box.
The Android app now bundles a tracker-blocking browser, Email Protection, App Tracking Protection, and the new Duck.ai anonymous chat — with the paid Privacy Pro tier sitting on top.
MAY 10, 2026
Google Messages finally closes the loop with iPhone.
End-to-end encrypted RCS between Android and iPhone is in beta with iOS 26.5, Magic Compose runs on-device through Gemini Nano, and the default Android SMS app has quietly become the most consequential messaging client Google ships.
MAY 10, 2026
Gboard is the Android keyboard everyone else is measured against.
Google's keyboard is pre-installed on most non-Samsung Android phones, learns aggressively from your typing, and has quietly absorbed every feature a third-party keyboard used to sell.
MAY 10, 2026
Yahoo Mail's AI rebuild is genuinely useful, and the inbox is still half ads.
The 2025 mobile rewrite added one-line message summaries, an Orders Hub, natural-language search, and a Planner tab. The ad density and the October regression complaints did not get rewritten with it.
MAY 10, 2026
Amazon Shopping is faster than ever and harder to navigate than ever.
Rufus answers in plain English, sub-same-day delivery quotes one-hour windows in major cities, and the home tab still buries the thing you came to buy under three rows of sponsored listings.
MAY 9, 2026
DuckDuckGo is the iPhone privacy product Apple was supposed to be.
What started as a search engine has become a full browser, an email forwarder, an AI chat layer, and a VPN. The bet — that consumers will pay for tracking-free as a positive product, not a defensive one — keeps paying off.
MAY 8, 2026