Offline AI on your iPhone: why we care

If you use an iPhone long enough, you eventually meet the same two popups: “iPhone Storage Almost Full” and a long privacy policy you’ll never have time to read.

I kept seeing both. Photos, screenshots, screen recordings, little game clips — they quietly added up. And every time I looked for a tool to help, I ran into the same pattern: sign in, upload everything, trust us.

At some point I realised: this is backwards. My photos shouldn’t have to leave my phone just to figure out which ones I don’t need.

Your iPhone is already a tiny supercomputer. It shouldn’t need a distant server to decide which blurry screenshot can be deleted.

That thought is basically the seed of FanStudio and our first utility, Photo Space Saver.

What “offline” means to us

“Offline” gets used a lot these days, sometimes in ways that are more marketing than reality. So it felt important to write down what it actually means for our apps.

For FanStudio, “offline” is three promises:

• Processing happens on your device. Photos, game state, documents — they’re analysed locally, not on our own servers.
• No surprise accounts. If an app doesn’t obviously need a login, we don’t add one just to collect more data.
• Minimal diagnostics. We rely on Apple’s crash reports and basic analytics. No third-party trackers, no ad SDKs spying on you across apps.

Technically, that means leaning on Apple’s frameworks as much as possible: PhotoKit to browse your library, on-device analysis powered by Apple’s photo APIs and lightweight models, and the system “Recently Deleted” album as a safety net.

But more than the stack, it’s a way of thinking. Any time we design a feature, the first question is:

“Can this be done locally, without us ever seeing the user’s data?”

If the honest answer is no, we usually park the idea or look for a smaller version of it that still respects that line.

The storage problem we kept bumping into

Back to that “Storage Almost Full” popup.

Modern iPhones take great photos, but they’re also very good at producing dozens of almost-identical shots: the burst from trying to catch the right expression, the slightly shaky night photo, the five attempts at the same screenshot.

When your storage is full, you don’t really want to think. You want a quick way to:

• Find the obvious low-value stuff (blurry shots, long screen recordings, huge clips).
• Keep the photos and videos that actually mean something.
• Clean up without the fear of hitting “Delete” on the wrong thing.

That’s the small, focused job we gave Photo Space Saver.

How Photo Space Saver fits into that idea

Photo Space Saver is not trying to be a cloud backup, an AI Instagram, or a magical auto-album maker. Its job is smaller and more practical:

• Scan locally for things that eat space: similar photos, blurry takes, screenshots, screen recordings, and large videos.
• Group them in a way that makes sense to humans (“similar shots”, “large videos”, “screenshots”).
• Make a safe suggestion for what to remove, while respecting favourites, edits, faces, and recent captures.
• Send deletions to the system “Recently Deleted” album, so you can change your mind.

Everything happens on the device. We don’t upload your photos, and we don’t keep a secret copy of what you deleted. When you close the app, the only traces are on your phone itself.

Is that the only way to build this kind of tool? Of course not. But it’s the way that feels right for us, and for the kind of users who notice when an app quietly asks for “create account” before it does anything useful.

Games in airplane mode

The same philosophy is behind our small games, Nexus Word Search and Color Pour: Potion Puzzle.

They’re intentionally simple: no online account, no daily “come back in 4 hours to collect rewards” loop, no always-on connection. Just something you can open on a flight, on the subway, or in a waiting room and actually enjoy… without your battery or data plan slowly melting.

There are already plenty of games and apps fighting for your attention. We’re more interested in the ones that quietly do their job, respect your time, and then get out of the way.

Where this is going

Photo Space Saver is just the first utility under the FanStudio name. There are more ideas on the whiteboard: document tools that can summarise on-device, smarter photo organisation that doesn’t require a cloud account, small helpers that make your phone feel lighter instead of busier.

None of this is “anti-cloud”. The cloud is great for a lot of things. But there’s a big, important space for tools that stay with you, on the devices you already carry, without needing to phone home.

If that resonates with you, there are a few simple ways to follow along:

• Try Photo Space Saver and tell us what you think.
• Subscribe to our low-volume newsletter at the bottom of the home page.
• Say hi on X at @FanStudioApps.

Either way, thanks for reading. And the next time that storage popup appears, I hope it’s a little easier to deal with.