Sidecar ML

Turn your iPhone into a private, on-device AI server for your whole network.

Sidecar ML runs a lightweight HTTP server on your iPhone that exposes Apple's built-in machine-learning models to any device on your local network. Tap Start Server, scan the QR code, and your Mac, PC, Raspberry Pi, or browser can call powerful on-device AI over plain REST — no cloud, no accounts, no API keys, no usage fees, and no data leaving your network.

Everything runs on the phone. Nothing is uploaded to a server and there's nothing to pay for. (The one exception, music recognition, matches against Apple's catalog and tells you so up front.)

ONE IPHONE, A DOZEN AI CAPABILITIES

• Chat with the on-device large language model through a chat-completions endpoint that's compatible with the popular OpenAI API format — streaming, JSON mode, and structured output included. Point existing tools and SDKs at your phone and they just work.
• Generate images from a text prompt in a choice of art styles.
• OCR — pull text out of photos, receipts, and screenshots with per-line boxes and multi-language support.
• Read barcodes and QR codes (EAN, Code128, and more).
• Classify images across roughly a thousand categories, or produce image embeddings for similarity search.
• Remove backgrounds and isolate subjects or people as clean PNG cut-outs.
• Detect faces and facial landmarks, body pose, and hand pose.
• Scan documents with automatic edge detection and perspective correction.
• Convert speech to text and text to speech, with a wide range of voices (including Personal Voice).
• Translate text between languages completely offline.
• Analyse text: language, sentiment, named entities, tokens, and embeddings.
• Classify sounds across hundreds of categories, or identify the music that's playing.

BUILT FOR DEVELOPERS AND MAKERS

• Clean REST + Server-Sent Events API — call it from curl, Python, JavaScript, or any HTTP client.
• Chat endpoint compatible with the OpenAI format, so many existing tools and SDKs work unchanged.
• Automatic discovery on your network via Bonjour.
• Honest capability reporting: ask the server what it can do and it tells you exactly what's available on your device, and why.
• Optional bearer-token authentication to lock the server down on shared networks.

FREE WEB CONSOLE AND CODE EXAMPLES

A ready-to-use web console — plus Python examples, a command-line client, and full API documentation — is free and open-source. Download the single-file console and browse the source here:

https://github.com/AndersFB/Sidecar-ML-Console/

Open the console in any browser, enter your phone's address, and try every capability with a friendly UI — nothing to install.

GOOD TO KNOW

• The on-device large language model and image generation require an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone. The other capabilities run on a much wider range of devices.
• The server runs while the app is in the foreground; a keep-awake option helps during longer sessions.
• Some features (offline translation language pairs and certain speech models) download their models on first use.

Turn the iPhone in your pocket into a private AI endpoint for your projects, your home lab, and your prototypes — Sidecar ML.