Forgetless
A private, on-device memory app for iOS and Android that passively captures notifications, screenshots, and in-app text and lets you semantically search your digital life — zero cloud, zero telemetry.
Privacy-conscious professionals and researchers who want a searchable second brain without trusting Big Tech
- Passive on-device capture via accessibility hooks, notification listener, and offline OCR
- Hybrid keyword + vector semantic search ("that article about..." instead of strict keyword match)
- Local-only LLM chat that answers strictly from your captured history
- Encrypted local vault (SQLCipher + on-device embeddings like bge-small)
Backlash against Microsoft Recall and growing distrust of cloud AI surveillance coincide with new efficient on-device LLMs (Phi-3, Gemma 2) that finally make local semantic search feasible on phones.
On-device mobile AI is a heavily-covered 2025 trend (Apple Intelligence on-device foundation models, Google EmbeddingGemma launch) but the source Dev.to post got 0 reactions and the previous category leader Rewind was shut down after Meta acquired Limitless in Dec 2025, suggesting demand is real but volatile.On-Device AI for Mobile: Tiny LLMs, Vision Models, RAG & Private Search ↗5 Best Rewind AI Alternatives in 2026 (Rewind Is Gone — Here's What Works) ↗
Privacy-first on-device memory space is already crowded: Pieces, Carly, Stashpad, Mem.ai, Glean all explicitly position around private/local recall; Meta's Limitless acquisition closed Rewind in Dec 2025 but Pieces was already claiming the on-device privacy niche.Best Rewind AI Alternatives in 2026 (Free & Paid) | ToolChase ↗Best Rewind AI Alternatives to consider in 2025 | Pieces ↗
Mem.ai, Limitless, and Glean run subscription models showing willingness to pay in adjacent categories, but privacy-conscious pros are notoriously price-sensitive and the niche phone-memory category has no proven paid scale (Rewind/Limitless only reached sustainability via Meta acquisition).Limitless Competitors & Alternatives (2026) | Product Hunt ↗Best Rewind AI Alternatives 2026 ranked by pricing | ToolChase ↗
Strong regulatory tailwinds (EU AI Act, GDPR, post-Recall backlash) and durable platform shifts — Apple opened on-device foundation model access to developers at WWDC25 and Google shipped EmbeddingGemma in 2025 specifically for on-device semantic search/RAG.Apple Intelligence gets even more powerful with new capabilities across Apple devices ↗Introducing EmbeddingGemma: The Best-in-Class Open Model for On-Device ↗
Embedding-side is now genuinely feasible (EmbeddingGemma 300M params runs on everyday devices with Matryoshka dimensions down to 128) but iOS severely restricts background notification and in-app text capture compared to Android's NotificationListenerService, making the core capture premise half-implementable on iPhone.Embedding Gemma running on device | Medium ↗EmbeddingGemma — Google DeepMind ↗