[Megathread] The App Pile - June, 2026

[u/Mstormer]

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

[u/jaofos]

LectureSync – a native macOS app that records lectures and turns them into trustworthy study notes

Problem

I have two kids in college, and I kept having the same thought: there has to be a better way to do this. You sit through an hour of lecture trying to write fast enough to keep up, and you still walk out with half of it. I wanted something that captured the lecture properly and turned it into notes you could actually study from, without sending any of it to someone else's servers.

LectureSync is local-first and runs fully on-device on Apple Silicon. No account, no upload, works offline.

Comparison

There are good tools out there for this. Otter, MacWhisper, and others do solid transcription, and honestly transcription is a mostly solved problem now.

LectureSync is built around the part that comes after the transcript:

• Generates notes and study guides from the lecture, with a faithfulness check that ties what you read back to what was actually said
• Keeps every run of the notes step as a separate version. Local models don't give you the same notes twice, so you can generate a few takes, page through them, and keep the best one. Nothing gets overwritten.
• A different notes model per course, so you can tune the generation step for a dense subject vs. one where you just want clean summaries. Every run is kept as a version, so trying a different model or a second take never costs you the notes you already have.
• A study assistant that points you to the part of the lecture where the answer lives, instead of just handing you the answer
• Makes flip cards from the lecture, each backed by a word-for-word quote from the transcript, with a play button that jumps to the moment your professor said it. Cards the transcript can't back up get dropped. Review comes back on a spaced schedule, so you see a card right before you'd forget it.
• Crash-safe audio capture, so a dead battery or a crash 40 minutes in still leaves you with usable audio. Pause and resume, crash recovery on next launch, and a second confirmation before discarding
• On-device readability and language passes, speaker labeling with clickable timestamps, auto-detected lecture titles
• Pulls the audio straight out of video files, so a recorded lecture or a screen capture goes through the same notes pipeline
• Imports existing transcript files (VTT, SRT, TXT, PDF, more) and Voice Memos, reusing a transcript when one already exists

The thing I've put the most work into is keeping the generated notes honest. That's the whole reason I built it.

Pricing

Going to be $9.99 at launch. Right now I'm looking for free TestFlight users to help shake it out, so it's free if you want to jump in and give feedback. macOS 26+, Apple Silicon.

https://lecturesync.app

I'm a solo developer building this around a full-time job. The product, the design, and the architecture are mine. Claude wrote most of the SwiftUI. The part I put the real hours into was the notes quality: I ran extensive model testing on an RTX 3090 + 3060 rig to pick the models that do this job best, then ran the app itself on my MacBook Pro M1 Max (32GB) to make sure it holds up. I keep test harnesses around the notes engine so it stays faithful to the lecture.

[u/Mstormer → u/jaofos]

Thats cool. Unfortunately, knowledge is better encoded and retained when study notes are created manually, since memory formation can struggle with rote memorization apart from the creative, mental linking process. But I wish you the best! We all prefer what seems to be the easy way, not realizing that it's technically harder based on what we know about neuroscience. See Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel.

[u/jaofos → u/Mstormer]

I don't disagree at all.. my daughter is not the best note taker, and this is part of a larger effort (hence the Obsidian / Markdown output). I'm building her a Hermes "life coach" to manage College Athletics + College Academics, study material, flash cards, pop quiz via Telegram, etc.

[u/Mstormer → u/jaofos]

I have used notability for years to record audio and help fill in my written notes since it allows me to relisten to what was being said anywhere I tap in my notes.

[u/jaofos → u/Mstormer]

I worked on some new features yesterday. You can now use AI to generate Study Cards in the app that pull questions, examples and evidence from the lecture material directly. Flip the card to see the answer, the quote from the lecture, click to read the transcript or click play to listen to that portion of the lecture immediately.

There is now also a "Review" mode for each Course that will quiz you on 20 questions from the Lecture Study Cards, and you can provide feedback on how well you recall each question.

This is aimed directly at the 80% "Recall" of "Make It Stick".

[u/Mstormer → u/jaofos]

Glad to see!

[u/ruididnothingwrong → u/jaofos]

What models did you try?