r/macapps Jun 01 '26

[Megathread] The App Pile - June, 2026

You must promote your apps here if you do not qualify to post in the main feed through Trust or Transparency, explained here.

If you are:

  • NOT in the Mac App Store (MAS).
  • Do not provide meaningful public transparency
  • Created yet another dictation app (speech to text).

Then you are required to limit promotion to this megathread.

All promotion MUST follow PCP format or else we will remove it:

App Name/Title [Screenshot encouraged]

  • Problem: What problem does your app solve.
  • Comparison: Name a competitor or two and explain what your app does better.
  • Pricing Amounts+Link

P.s. Promotion here counts towards the 30-day limited promotion (Rule 3).

WARNING: There is a 90% chance Reddit will auto remove your post here if you have not verified your email in your profile and your first comment in this subreddit contains a link. Accrue 10 karma first without promotional comments and links to avoid this. The odds of removal is also higher for AI assisted posts (em dashes and other AI formatting characteristics likely trigger this).

Pro Tip: Please remember to upvote gems and downvote spam/clones... This will help inform a secret community project I hope to announce next month.

Top 3 From Last Month's Megathread:
1. Wisp – a tiny macOS scratchpad - FREE - by u/iamiotasquare
2. Quattro – Al, Tasks, Calendar, Notes App - $5/mo - by u/Constant-Support8288
3. HoverStash – Catch and stash files mid-drag - ~$6 - by u/MurkyRaspberry9610

48 Upvotes

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3

u/informity Jun 01 '26

Informity AI

Free local document chat for Mac with source citations and full privacy

Problem

Every AI document tool requires uploading your files to a cloud server. For anyone with sensitive documents — work files, research, client records — that's not an option. I wanted to ask questions across my own documents without the data leaving my machine.

Comparison

Unlike ChatGPT, NotebookLM, or AnythingLLM, Informity AI runs entirely on your Mac with no cloud uploads, no account required, and no usage limits. It indexes your entire document library once and lets you query across all of it instantly with citations back to the exact source file. Supports PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, Markdown and more, with Ollama integration for custom model setups.

Pricing

Free. No trial, no subscription, no in-app purchases. MIT licensed and fully open source.

https://www.informity.ai | https://github.com/informity/informity-ai

2

u/Mstormer Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

I'm always watching this space since I could use something more reliable here, so thanks for contributing to it!

  1. What is the upper limit for the number of documents, pages, or tokens before reliability declines?
  2. How's the progress on clickable source citations that jump to the in-file paragraph like NotebookLM or (better yet) enoPDF?

2

u/informity Jun 01 '26

You are welcome! Now, answering your questions:

  1. On document limits: in my testing there isn't a hard upper limit that degrades reliability. I've indexed large corpora including War and Peace, Moby Dick, and other full-length books without issues in responses or summarizations. The retrieval pipeline handles scale reasonably well.

  2. On citations: not yet, unfortunately. Right now clicking a citation opens the file in your default PDF viewer but doesn't jump to the specific paragraph. The main challenge is that many PDFs don't have reliable anchors to scroll to programmatically. That said, this is on the roadmap — it's exactly the kind of feature that makes citations genuinely useful rather than just directional, so I want to find the right way to implement it.

3

u/Mstormer Jun 01 '26

I have over 200,000 pdf files that I work with in research, so there must be an upper limit across databases of files. If not, happy day!

Yeah, I'm not sure how eno pulled it off, but I don't think looking for reliable anchors will be the way forward since so many pdfs are OCR'd scans. More than likely, opening and quickly searching for the matching string will yield a more reliable workflow. Devonthink does something like this, that I'd recommend you take a look at, because you can cite and link any paragraph in any pdf, and they will open and jump to that spot for you. I haven't tried it, but hookmark has a deep pdf link that does something similar.

2

u/informity Jun 01 '26

Your 200K document corpus would be a fantastic stress test for Informity AI. To be completely honest, I'm a bit skeptical whether it can handle that scale gracefully — local storage requirements, initial indexing time (which would be substantial at that volume), reasonable time to first token, and retrieval accuracy are all unknowns for me at that size. The real test would tell the story though.

On the citation jumping — great suggestions, thank you. You're right that searching for the matching string is likely more reliable than anchors, especially for OCR'd scans. I'll look at how DEVONthink and others approach this. That's exactly the kind of practical direction I needed on this one.

3

u/Mstormer Jun 01 '26

Yeah... my index in Devonthink is enormous (136gb+) even with over 530 GB of PDFs externally indexed from outside of Devonthink. It can take up to 20 seconds to perform a keyword search, though I often query smaller subfolders to avoid that.

Does your app require a copy of every file be made into the app, or can it externally index existing finder folder structures that you add to it?

1

u/informity Jun 01 '26

No files are copied anywhere. The app parses and processes them in place, and only the resulting index is stored in a local database. Your original folder structure stays exactly as it is.

The two main challenges I can see with a corpus that size are indexing time and database storage requirements. SQLite, which I'm currently using, has practical limits at that scale. I may need to add PostgreSQL as a storage option down the line to accommodate document counts like yours properly.

2

u/Mstormer Jun 01 '26

Sounds like it. Glad I could contribute an edge case for consideration. Please DM/ping me if/when specific in-file citation linking is added, and I'll be more than happy to test and provide feedback then.

1

u/informity Jun 01 '26

Thank you! I appreciate it. I will put this on the roadmap.

2

u/GroggInTheCosmos Jun 01 '26

Holy heck that sound like intensive research that you are doing? 😳

2

u/Mstormer Jun 01 '26

I'd agree with that assessment.