Blackwall: Offline AI Chat

Turn on airplane mode. Ask it a question. It answers.

Blackwall runs a language model on your iPhone or iPad. Not a thin client for someone else's server — the actual model, loaded into your device's memory, generating each word on your hardware. There is no account to create, no subscription, and no request leaving your phone.

WHAT THAT MEANS IN PRACTICE

Your conversations are never uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload them to. No history sitting in a company's database. No terms-of-service change that quietly starts training on your messages. Nothing to delete from a server, because nothing was ever on one.

Blackwall works on a plane, on the subway, in a country where the usual assistants are blocked, and on a phone with no SIM.

SEVEN CURRENT MODELS, YOUR CHOICE

A small model is built in, so you can ask something the second you open the app. From there you pick what you want to run:

• Qwen3.5 — 0.8B to 9B, from instant short answers to quality-first text work
• Gemma 4 E2B — general chat plus image and document understanding
• MiniCPM-V 4.6 — focused OCR for screenshots, receipts and documents
• Phi-4 Mini Reasoning — English math and structured derivations

Each optional download is resumable and checksum-verified. Blackwall tells you whether a model fits your device before you spend the bandwidth, and you can delete any of them later.

Already have a model you like? Import any .gguf file and Blackwall will run it.

READ, LISTEN, SUMMARISE — ALL ON DEVICE

• OCR and image understanding: point it at a receipt, a screenshot, a whiteboard
• PDF and text documents: summarise a contract without emailing it to anyone
• Voice input using Apple's on-device speech recognition
• Text-to-speech for replies
• Local memory that carries context between conversations
• Export any thread as Markdown, or share a reply as an image

BUILT FOR THE DEVICE

iPad split view with a docked thread list. Keyboard shortcuts. A home-screen and lock-screen widget. Siri Shortcuts — "Ask Blackwall" works with no signal.

Two appearances: Terminal, the full neon look, with nine themes to pick from — or Standard, plain high-contrast type that follows your device's light or dark setting. Five typefaces. Adjustable text size.

THE HONEST PART

Local models are smaller than the ones running in datacentres. A 4B model on a phone will not match a frontier model on a server, and Blackwall does not pretend otherwise — it tells you what each model is good at and what it costs in storage, memory and speed.

The one thing Blackwall downloads is the model file itself, from Hugging Face, when you ask it to. After that you can stay offline forever.

Requires iOS 17. A device with 6 GB of memory is recommended for mid-size models; the 9B model requires 12 GB.