Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app | Hacker News Reader

Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

ente.com

361 pointsmatthiaswh178 comments

Maybe I’m missing it but the page is really light on technical information. Is this a quantized / distilled model of a larger LLM? Which one? How many parameters? What quantization? What T/s can I expect? What are the VRAM requirements? Etc etc

I tried it on my iPhone 13 mini. I believe the model you get changes depending on your phone specs. For me it downloaded a ~1.3GB model which can speak in complete sentences but can’t do much beyond that. Can’t blame them though—that model is tiny, and my device wasn’t designed for this.

You can see what it uses here - https://github.com/ente-io/ente/blob/main/web/apps/ensu/src/...

Either LFM2.5-1.6B-4bit or Qwen3.5-2B-8bit or Qwen3.5-4B-4bit

Huh, 1.6B/2B/4B models, I guess they weren't joking when they said "not as powerful as ChatGPT or Claude Code". Also unsure why they said "Claude Code", it's not an CLI agent AFAIK?

This seems to be a general chat app, but otherwise small models can be very effective within the right use cases and orchestration.

> otherwise small models can be very effective within the right use cases and orchestration

very limited amount of use cases, perhaps. As a generalized chat assistant? I'm not sure you'd be able to get anything of value out from them, but happy to be proven otherwise. I have all of those locally already, without fine-tuning, what use case could I try right now where any of those are "very effective"?

Judging from my experimentation with local models:

You can use a small coding model to produce working code with a deterministic workflow (ex: state machine) if you carefully prune the context and filter down what it can do per iteration. Instead of letting it "reason" through an ever growing history, you give it distinct piecemeal steps with tailored context.

I think this can be generalized to:

Anything that can be built from small, well understood pieces and can be validated and fixed step by step. Then the challenge becomes designing these workflows and automating them.

(I'm not there yet, but one thing I have in mind might be a hybrid approach where the planning is produced by a more expensive model. The output it has to produce are data driven state machines or behavior trees (so they can be validated deterministically). Then it offloads the grunt work to a small, local model. When it's done, the work gets checked etc.)

> Also unsure why they said "Claude Code", it's not an CLI agent AFAIK?

Claude Code is a Desktop app as well.

The consfusing way AI companies like to name products is something to be studied.

tbf they're not the only one doing so, we had 3 different "Microsoft Teams" and "Outlook" until recently...

I don’t think so. IIRC the desktop app is called Claude and it has a code option in the UI.

If you go to the product website: https://claude.com/product/claude-code

> Use Claude Code where you work

> Desktop Termianl IDE WEb and iOS Slack

Not that it is important any way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Claude Cowork (part of the Desktop app) is claude code, running inside a VM.

Helpful writeup here: https://pvieito.com/2026/01/inside-claude-cowork (I am not the author)

Ok, but "Claude Code"/"Claude Desktop" regardless is software, a tool, not a model/LLM. Doesn't make much sense as they've written it.

For the end user who just installs the app it's probably all the same. It's not a technical document.

For the user it's just important that the small grimlin that sits in the Ente app is not as smart as the grimlin that sits in the Claude app.

I so wanted to love Liquid AI's models, but despite their speed I was never able to get anything useful out of them. Even their larger models can't be trusted with simple stuff like inserting a column into a markdown table. The advertised tool calling is also not great. What I found interesting was that the ones I tried were a little light on guardrails.

I would really like to know what people use these small and tiny models for. If any high-karma users are reading it, would you consider posting Ask HN?

Hmm, the Mac app downloaded gemma-3-4b-it-Q4_K_M.gguf for me (on an Apple M4) - maybe the desktop apps download different models?

Though, I don't see any references to Gemma at all in the open source code...

The only takeaway for me from this is that the Ente is at < $10m/year in revenue. Because the LFM model license has a commercial use threshold of $10m.

https://www.liquid.ai/lfm-license

I have the same questions. After installing the app, it downloads 2.5 GB of data. I presume this is the model.

Given how the blog is presented, I assumed this was something novel that solved a unique problem, maybe a local multi-modal assistant for your device.

I installed it and it's none of that. It is a mere wrapper around small local LLM models. And, it's not even multi-modal! Anyone could've one-shotted this in Claude in an hour (I'm not exaggerating).

What's the target audience here? Your average person doesn't care about the privacy value proposition (at least not by severely sacrificing chat model's quality). And users who do want that control can already install LMStudio/Llama.cpp (which is dead simple to setup).

The actual release product should've been what's described in "What's next" section.

> Instead of general chat, we shape Ensu to have a more specialized interface, say like a single, never-ending note you keep writing on, while the LLM offers suggestions, critiques, reminders, context, alternatives, viewpoints, quotes. A second brain, if you will.

> A more utilitarian take, say like an Android Launcher, where the LLM is an implementation detail behind an existing interaction that people are already used to.

> Your agent, running on your phone. No setup, no management, no manual backups. An LLM that grows with you, remembers you, your choices, manages your tasks, and has long-term memory and personality.

> Anyone could've one-shotted this in Claude in an hour (I'm not exaggerating).

This probably could have been one-shotted with Sonnet, not even Opus. Given how over indexed they are on LLM coding, Haiku might even be able to do it.

This is actually an interesting coding model benchmark task now that I think about it.

You'd think any one of these great LLMs that claim coding is over would take a non-trivial app and just clone it while fully documenting the process.

If it's so great, why is there so little viscera documenting it's greatness? Just lots and lots of words.

They've done that for some tech, and the output has been... well, kind of impressive that it works at all, but bad in other ways (a GCC clone, SQLite re-impl, among others)

Coding is definitely not over IMO. Not yet anyway

Is “this could have been one-shotted with Sonnet” the new “I could build this in a weekend?”

I always stop to ask myself, "but did I?" Usually I haven't, and that takes the edge off for me

> Anyone could've one-shotted this in Claude in an hour

I think they did. If you start the download and then open the sidebar and/or background the app, the download progress bar disappears and is replaced by the download button. If you press the download button again, the progress bar reappears at the correct point.

I find that Claude often makes little statefulness mistakes like that. Human developers do too, but the slower and more iterative nature of human development makes it more likely that that would get caught.

It’s a platform play so they can get people onto their defunct photos platform. “Big Tech” in a little suit.

All about immich now right?

What do you when you say defunct photos platform?

How is Ente Photos defunct? It's getting new features all the time and it works extremely well for me.

Defunct? I just switched to it a couple months ago, and it seems actively developed.

(Though I think this announcement is sufficiently unpleasant I'm starting to reconsider)

Ente has a killer feature of supporting actual end-to-end encryption for photos. That alone puts them above many other competitors.

Local LLM options for less technical people is worth celebrating IMO. No, not "anybody" can have one-shotted this in CC in an hour.

We have not seen a tidal wave of untechnical people vibe coding up their own software solutions.

To add to this, the value that ente or someone like that can bring to the table here is a firm pledge to improve it and maintain it going forward.

That to me is more valuable than code vibe coded by Claude in one afternoon.

> We have not seen a tidal wave of untechnical people vibe coding up their own software solutions.

When my little brother who is a drummer, and has never even looked at "code" before, had claude on-shot a python app that let him download songs on youtube, extract the stems, collect tempo/key/etc information, then feed that into his DAW, all without ever looking at code, knowing what any of it did, etc., I knew that we were about to see a LOT of single-use applications.

I'm not against it, honestly. I have always written little one-off scripts and apps that accomplished something faster than manually, now that those one-shots are possible with an LLM in seconds sometimes, it makes all my personal scripts so much easier... that said, I definitely read the scripts that are output, and attempt to step through them in a debugger before assuming it is all good.

edit: nevermind I misread a word and made a social faux pas

I do agree that more local LLM options are always better.

>not

Ope

naux pas :)

I hate to say it, but this looks like the sort of thing a CEO told their team to build on Monday morning in a panic because they are grasping for ways to participate in the AI craze. And the team did just that: they built it that morning using Claude Code.

There is truly nothing original here and the product doesn't have a chance in hell of earning money. Local LLMs on-device will be dominated by the device vendors, whose control of the hardware stack combined with their ability to subsidize billions of dollars of machine learning research gives them an unfair advantage. Apple knows what the next generation of silicon will deliver, and their ML engineers are already hard at work building models that will be highly optimized for that silicon a year or two ahead of time. Open source models are really great and are backed by well funded labs; however, delivering these models on-device in a way that pleases users will never be easier than it is for the vendors of the devices.

Plus, device vendors have ways of making money from local LLMs that third-party app providers do not. They can make their local LLM free and earn money on the hardware play, without skipping a beat on the billions of dollars of ongoing R&D. I don't see how third party app vendors make money here when they will be competing with the decent, totally free alternative that Apple and Google (and Samsung etc.) will load on in the next year or two.

Wanted to share a message here with the CEO not to feel too bad because little is more common than getting caught by this tech

But where are they! https://ente.com/about

Small team, rooting for them

I write my comment with admiration for founders, because I am one. That being said, chasing trends without paying attention to the steamroller has killed more than one very good company and I have plenty of scar tissue as evidence...

Counter position (not sure it's better than yours): what are the chances that device makers would actually offer seriously local, and not just something that does work in airplane mode, but then still connects to their cloud later, if not for post-sale monetization then at least for features providing better brand lock-in? I mean just look at how well the market for TV sets that don't try to shove "services" down buyers' throats is developing...

But sure, making money with standalone "local first is our headline feature" will be incredibly hard against those, no doubt about that. In light of the limited quality of what local models can achieve, the privacy bonus just won't compel many to pay. But that only means that this "morning with Claude" you are suggesting might be just the right amount of investment for the result you'd realistically expect. But is that so bad? I'd argue the reverse: bundling up the low hanging fruit but not by some hobbyist who will lose interest two weeks on but by a company big enough the keep it going while small enough to not be a VC furnace that will inevitably turn on users once the runway runs out (*), that's an opportunity to fill a niche few others can. Valuable for users who don't want to roll their own deployment of open source models (can't, or unwilling to commit to keeping them up to date, assuming that Ente does keep that ball rolling), and also valuable for the company of the investment actually is so low that it pays by raising awareness for their other products that apparently do earn them money.

(*) I was googling around a little wondering if they actually are as close to bootstrapped as they seem on the surface, and yes, that's supposedly the core idea [0], but despite that they also took 100 kUSD in "non-diluting" (basically a gift then?) from Mozilla with the explicit goal "to promote independent AI and machine learning" [1]. So not a CEO whim but following up to a promise made earlier. If they actually did avoid spending all that money on a one-off but went smaller planning to keep it current for a longer time horizon, I'd congratulate them on an excellent choice.

[0] https://ente.com/blog/5-years-of-ente/

[1] https://ente.io/blog/mozilla-builders/

The hn discussion for [1] seems to be completely missing the point, that Mozilla program isn't about funding an image host (yeah, I'd also prefer if Mozilla focused on the Browser and perhaps Thunderbird, but the foundation is what it is): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681666

To be fair I've followed ente for a while and they seem to let their teams have side projects if it falls in line with the overall ente ethos.

Same with Kagi. Thats where Kagi news was born.

I quite like the ethos, but this Ensu definitely seems underbaked.

I do find it quite funny how unless you're using one of the frontier labs interfaces, more or less all other 'model providers' are using small models that work on a macbook. Proton did something similar - I've tried their version and I find it pretty awful relative to just running Qwen 3.5 locally.

You would think so but Apple certainly hasn’t managed it yet.

Probably just another ollama-type service who wants to slide themselves in between the user and local models, so they can take all the credit and work on convenience based platform lock-in, then later introduce paid tiers.

That could be very valuable for a lot of users.

And I don’t think they are trying to hide the strategy to have paid tiers, that’s what they did for their other product.

There's dozens of local inference apps that basically wrap llama.cpp and someone else's GGUFs. The decentralized sync history part seems new? Not much else. But the advertisement copy is so insufferably annoying in how it presents this wrapper as a product.

Have a comparison chart to Ollama, LMStudio, LocalAI, Exo, Jan.AI, GPT4ALL, PocketPal, etc.

There are so many wrappers that are obviously wrappers. I wonder if part of the value proposition here is that it is “like a product.” I have no idea if they actually achieve that, though, and doubt it really could be proven on a site.

oMLX is worth a look too if you are on a mac.

I would love to see a "distributed LLM" system, where people can easily setup a system to perform a "piece" of a "mega model" inference or training. Kind of like SETI@home but for an open LLM (like https://github.com/evilsocket/cake but massive )

Ideally if you "participate" in the network, you would get "credits" to use it proportionally to how much GPU power you have provided to the network. Or if you can't, then buy credits (payment would be distributed as credits to other participants).

That way we could build huge LLMs that area really open and are not owned by any network.

I would LOVE to participate in building that as well.

Oh yeah, and maybe call it "SkyNet" or something.

https://docs.anarchai.org/

This was posted the other day, but only briefly made the front page - seems kinda like what you’re talking about

Oooh thanks a lot. This looks promising. Maybe the only missing thing would be sone kind of (economic) incentive to share GPU power.

Although the ability to use large models "for free" sounds pretty rad.

I’d volunteer my spare gpu time if i knew it was going to … idk basically anyone except spammers, scammers, and corpos.

That's why the use has to have some kind of cost. Sure, spammers and scammers will always have spare money, as long as the bounty is higher.

But the alternative is "not having Email", because Email can be used by the same bad actors.

https://psyche.network/runs

This is exactly what I've been building — mycellm.ai. Seed GPU when idle, earn credits, spend on inference. BitTorrent economics for LLM compute. It's live now (my homelab serves the public chat). Would love to have you involved — github.com/mycellm/mycellm

Heard the first time about them (ente) yesterday in a discussion about "which 2FA are u using?". Directly switched to https://ente.com/auth/ on Android and Linux Desktop and very happy with it.

Going to give this a try...

You presumably had a working 2fa app already, but off the cuff decide to switch to new unvetted variant X; basically unknown auth system after reading a few paragraphs of text in an afternoon?

Does this seem sound?

While I would have the same reaction, in this case I think it is a sane decision. Ente is cornering the privacy market and I think they're doing a great job. They have a lot to lose (trust) and it would be stupid if they did something shady with the data entered in the 2FA app.

> cornering the privacy market

this seems self-contradictory

Sorry, English is not my first language and I tried to look clever.

Not knowing them, how could OP trust them instantly? Whether they really have that trust or not, you have to know them for a while and from many different trustable sources. The story is a bit strange.

There are the issues of competence and track record, not only intent.

Ente is extremely well known in the privacy circles, so this is not just some random company with a random app out of nowhere. Check PrivacyGuides for example.

Ok I checked privacyguides.

Here’s where it was added to PrivacyGuides - https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/issues/36.... The person opening the issue is the CEO of ente. So the CEO of ente gets his company mentioned in PrivacyGuides back when it was new and that makes it more legit?

PrivacyGuides goes through their own process of vetting (whether you would agree with their process or not that’s another topic) so I think the discussion to add Ente Photos is the more relevant link https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/ente-photo-management/11...

> PrivacyGuides goes through their own process of vetting ... so I think the discussion

The discussion is not all that relevant as PrivacyGuides does not rely solely on community input. The core team pretty much generates content and lists recommendations based on (what they claim is) their own research (which isn't saying much).

  The forum and community really give us a lot of external insights, with the voting system letting us poll how popular something is. 

  While we put a very heavy importance on the community consensus, it is mostly up to the team to decide what comes and goes, where more heavy decisions require more votes...

  A reason why it has never really been written out is that policies can be gamed, and the team really wants to be able to veto decisions...

  As far as "evaluating"/reviewing tools the methods to do so are not documented...

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/32774

if it helps, I've used ente for a year and I really like it.

I ended up picking them because they were the only open source one that worked on all my devices IIRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OTP_applications

What's the risk?

They just store tokens, without other FA at "worst" you get locked of your account but nobody else has access either. You're also supposed to, as good practice, not be limited to token generation and typically have a dozen or so of recovery tokens. Also if they were somewhat not working at doing the 1 task they should do, namely generate tokens, then you won't be able to use them so it won't even be added.

So... I might be missing something, can you please explain what worries you and why I should thus worry too?

Not saying they’re a paid promoter. But if I paid someone to speak about my newly launched product, they’d say something exactly like that. “Never heard of these guys before, but I loved their other product you’ve never heard of. I’m super excited to try this one!”

> new unvetted variant X; basically unknown auth system

Valid concerns. In the case of Ente Auth though, it is used by folks working at CERN [0], who also sponsored a recent security audit: https://ente.com/blog/cern-audit/

[0] https://cern.service-now.com/service-portal?id=kb_article&n=... / https://auth.docs.cern.ch/trouble-shooting/2fa-tips/

Oh, wow, thanks for posting that. I switched to Ente for my photos recently, had no idea they also have a 2FA app. I was looking for a replacement for Aegis (after a switch to iOS), and this can even import from Aegis backup files. Neat. This means I can finally ditch my old phone I still had to have around just for 2FA :)

I was just thinking their end goal seems to be to harvest creds by putting their own rebadged distribution of local models. That’s the only “business” model that makes sense.

Expressly harvesting creds through a 2FA app seems a little more direct.

Ente offers E2EE photo hosting, the storage they sell through subscriptions to that is their business model. Their main selling point is that all machine learning to cluster faces is done on your devices. I would assume that they want more users to train their models on to improve their core offering

I'm very happy syncing between KeepassXC on Debian and Keepass2Android on mobile. It handles TOTP accoss devices.

What I'm missing is a way to create and use Passkeys across devices. My use case does not support creating a new Passkey on every device, I need to sync them via servers I control. The system that supports that will be the system that I migrate to.

And you can self-host the server if you want to! Running Ente Auth since quite a while now and am very happy with it.

I don't understand all the hate about ente, to be honest. Ente seems to try to solve the big tech lock in with their apps. Personally, i'm a very happy Ente Photos user, so what's the problem with Ensu? It's available on desktops and mobile, it's an app trying to give all a little bit more privacy and freedom and yet most comments are just hating on it. If you can vibe code Ensu in a week end, please do. Make a better clone if you want to, but don't hate on someone for their work for stupid reasons.

I think the hate boils down to "I could've built it in a day with Claude, but didn't, so they suck" sour grapes.

When the comments here say "there's no value because anyone could've compiled llama.cpp", you can see how detached from reality these people are.

Even jumping through the hoops to get an app on Play Store and Apple Store — an app that I can tell my friends to look up and download — is worth a lot.

An app that is also is available on Mac and PC, mind you.

I'm an ex-Google/Meta/Microsoft/Roblox software engineer, and I couldn't be bothered to do any of that.

Neither could the rest of HN. But I'm not the one complaining about lack of novelty or value in this proposition.

My personal gripe with Ente is that they seem to value making new half-baked products over making their current products feature-complete. Case-in-point: RAW photos are still not supported in Ente Photos [1]. Locker and now Ensu got priority over a key feature in making the Photos app a photos app.

[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/625

I like the idea of having a user-friendly app that lets you use LLMs locally. Tools like Ollama and LMStudio tend to put most people off because you have to decide for yourself which models to use and there are so many settings to configure. If the hardware you’re using is compatible, Ensu could be a drop-in replacement for casual ChatGPT users.

However, it’s a bit confusing because, for example, a larger LLM model was downloaded to my smartphone than to my computer. It would probably make the most sense if the app simply categorized devices into five different tiers and then, depending on which performance tier a device falls into, downloaded the appropriate model and simply informed the user of the performance tier. Over time, it would then be possible to periodically replace the LLM for each tier with better ones, or to redefine the device performance tiers based on hardware advancements.

Osaurus is what I use for local - it's a native Swift macOS app with sandboxing, agent tooling, and server capabilities. Mac only though.

LLMStudio is pretty darn easy and if I recall it recommends a model to install when you first start it

I love Ente Auth, but Ente (as a company/organization) does a somewhat poor job of calling out their non-photos apps in their branding and on their website. If you go to the "Download" button at the top of the page on this page about their LLM chat app, it downloads... their photo sharing application. If you click Sign Up, it takes you to a signup page with the browser title "Ente Photos" but the page text says "Private backups for your memories" with a picture of a lock - is that the Ente Auth signup, or the Ente Photos app signup?

A little bit of cleanup on their site to break out "Ente, our original photo sharing app" from the rest of their apps would do wonders, because I had to search around on the announcement to find the download for this app, which feels about like trying to find the popular Ente Auth app on their website

This is one of the reason I, as their user, am moving away. Things feel half-baked and I stopped trusting it with my data. I self host and the details for this were all over the place. Some of my contributions cleaning up the docs were rejected, so I grew even more wary. I am moving to Immich, even though I'd prefer e2ee for my photos even if I self host them.

EDIT: and there are long-standing bugs like this one, unaddressed: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/issues/3087

Further proving my point, I wasn't sure if you - a fellow commenter! - were talking about Ente Auth or Ente Photos until I re-read your comment and the linked issue. I think that they have great product(s) but terrible branding and apparently some growing pains as well.

I used both, actually. I root for them, too, but for the time being I am splitting.

Well ente photos is the one that provides the funding

I just tried it. It downloaded Qwen3.5 2B on my phone and it's pretty coherent in its sentences, but really annoying with the amount of Ente products mentioned in every occasion. Other than that it's fast enough to talk to and definitely an easy way to run a model locally on your phone.

>but really annoying with the amount of Ente products mentioned in every occasion

https://github.com/ente-io/ente/blob/f254af939ff6950b63edf5f... Here is the system prompt, kinda embarassing

what’s embarrassing about that?

Weird hype going on here in comments.

Also weird arrogance. Yeah, somebody else could have vibe coded it in a week. But they didn't, so they don't get the 100 HN klout points for it.

Helping non-technical people get off of ChatGPT.com and using increasingly better local models seems worth celebrating and continued iteration.

>Also weird arrogance

It's part for the course, yet I'm still surprised.

My favorite so far is a commenter proudly touting their own run-LLM-locally app to prove that they "did it already".

An app which is desktop only.

I am at loss when it comes to arguing with people like that.

I like Ente, but isn't their core product a photos application? Its offshoots like this and 2FA feel incongruous.

Their core product is local ML inference in the context of a photo app, i.e. a drop-in cloud dependency removal/replacement for non-technical, privacy-conscious users as well as those who want advanced functionality offline.

This does the same for language models.

I hadn’t thought of it that way. Makes sense.

Any half capable engineer can vibe code this in a week. Who cares?

Someone still has to.

>Any half capable engineer can vibe code this in a week. Who cares?

The people who got tired of waiting for "any half capable engineer" to do so.

It's not that hard to implement. I did: https://github.com/lone-cloud/gerbil

No you didn't.

>A desktop app for running Large Language Models locally

>desktop app

Make it an Android and iOS app, get it published in the respective stores, add cross-device sync, and then you'll have a comparable proposition.

That is, when I will be able to tell my friends to look up that Gerbil app and use that on their phone instead of ChatGPT when there's no service.

Why didn’t you?

I did: https://github.com/lone-cloud/gerbil

I am not seeing the Android App Store / Apple Store links on that page.

Can you post them here?

Ah, well done! I should not have underestimated you! Lol

Meanwhile, my Ente photos app crashes 20 times a day on iOS when using advanced functionality such as scrolling through my photos.

They also have a TOTP auth app?

If their photos app stopped crashing and they pursued basic feature parity between their iOS and desktop apps (IMO table stakes for a photo sync service) I'd have no issue recommending them. Instead, it seems like every so often they just branch off into a new direction, leaving the existing products unfinished. It's like Mozilla-level lack of focus.

Hi, could you please share logs from Settings > Support > Report bug?

We'd like to fix the crashes.

Sorry for the troubles.

if you are into local LLMs check out apfel

https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel

Apple Ai on the command line

Looks excellent -- thanks; shame older intel macs don't get it (a lot of those still around)

I've been having fun with this one https://github.com/osaurus-ai/osaurus

There is also another app called Off Grid, which lets you run any model from Hugging Face (of course you need to choose one your phone can handle).

https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai

There are literally 1000s of these types of apps. Why is this on the Front Page?

1000s?

I'd love to know a few more local LLM apps that are available on Android and iOS and Mac/PC under the same branding that I can point my non-technical friends to as a ChatGPT alternative that works offline (but still has sync across the devices).

Could you recommend a few?

I've been a big fan of Ente and their work and am a paying customer but, man, this comment in a long-standing GitHub feature request is ringing truer every day:

> Ente is becoming like Proton: too many products and a lack of focus, leading to lower quality and not delivering what customers want

https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/552#discussionco...

Hi, we had addressed this concern (along with the timelines for nested albums) during our recent AMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lkTspvi_mM&t=1728s

If you have any follow up questions, please do ask.

Hi Vishnu, thanks for engaging here – it is highly appreciated! Let me respond to a couple of your statements from the interview:

> I think it's important to offer a complete package

I agree. But doesn't that start with making one product (Ente Photos) good enough for people to actually be able to migrate? If Ente Photo really is your "home ground", as you say, shouldn't you prioritize accordingly? Specifically, in your response[0] to the GitHub issue I linked you say

> to pull it off with the finesse we would like, it will take us more than a quarter. […] I will mark this feature as unplanned until we have more engineering bandwidth.

But it seems you really do have the engineering bandwidth! You've just been prioritizing other products besides Ente Photos. I do understand that folder nesting in particular is a non-trivial change and if you look at the discussion on GitHub, I've actually been defending you rather heavily. But it's becoming increasingly difficult to do so – quite frankly, I am starting to doubt your product management is entirely on the right track if in 3 years you can't dedicate 3 months to the feature request with the highest number of votes by far. More generally, I am losing trust that any of your products will see enough polishing any time soon. (So I will definitely not put time into migrating anything else if I can't even migrate my photos yet.) And it seems I'm not the only one thinking that – your reputation among enthusiasts is starting to take a hit.

> There is no way Ente is going to let anyone else build a better photo app.

Words to live by! :-)

[0]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/552#discussionco...

Hey, thanks for the response.

For a bootstrapped, engineering-driven company like Ente, product offers the best leverage for growth. We are not P0-ing nested folders right now because we believe there are areas within the photos app investing into which will provide higher revenue returns, that we can re-invest into increasing our engineering bandwidth.

Now I understand the disappointment around us not prioritizing a feature that is blocking you from even using the product. It is a loss for all parties, but it is important for us to plan long-term. And while we're not prioritizing this specific feature, I don't think it is fair to say that we do not invest time into polish. We do care about our craft[0][1][2].

In case it helps, here's our product lead addressing the timelines for nested albums, and our perspectives around organization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lkTspvi_mM&t=367s

[0]: https://ente.com/blog/offline-gallery-faster-ml-family-feed-...

[1]: https://ente.com/blog/likes-comments-admin-settings-ente-pho...

[2]: https://ente.com/blog/introducing-rituals-public-links-ente-...

Thanks again for the YouTube link – I hadn't had time to watch the entire video yet, so I wasn't aware your product lead addressed nested folders specifically.

So how would nested tags interact with albums? Will I also be able to share (or contribute to) tags like I can share (or contribute to) albums? Actually, aren't albums already "tag-like" in the sense that photos can be assigned to multiple albums at the same time?

> And while we're not prioritizing this specific feature, I don't think it is fair to say that we do not invest time into polish. We do care about our craft[0][1][2].

This was overly harsh, my apologies!

You will be able to create "smart albums" with nested tags, and share (and contribute) to them.

Albums are tag-like in the sense you described it, but might be an overkill[0] for the outcome we wish to achieve - organization, sharing, and ability to respect original folder structure when a user exports their data.

[0]: https://ente.io/architecture

So if I understand you correctly, users will be able to share tags from a given album but you don't want to make tags separate collections (inside the existing album collection). But what is the alternative here if you want to secure access to the tags cryptographically (which I hope you do)?

A few thoughts:

1. Let's say files inside tags use the collection key of the parent album. Access to a tag (e.g. if I shared it with someone) therefore requires access to the collection key, thereby potentially exposing the entire album. (E.g. if a government agency got hold of a public link I've shared to a single tag inside a bigger album.) Bad.

2. Alternatively, let's say all file keys of files belonging to a tag will also be encrypted with an additional tag key (separately from the encryption with the collection key). This is certainly doable and I assume you already do a similar thing for photos belonging to multiple albums/collections. However, with nested tags this might get annoying fast if a file key needs to be encrypted not only with the tag key of the tag "foo/bar/baz" but also with the tag keys of "foo/bar" and "foo". If you wanted to avoid this, you'd encrypt the tag key of "foo/bar/baz" with the tag key of "foo/bar" and the latter with the tag key of "foo". But then isn't this more or less exactly what you would do if you implemented nested collections?

On top of this, you will need to store an encrypted map of tag -> tagged files somewhere both for performance reasons, for privacy reasons (if you stored the tags inside the files, you'd risk exposing them to people the tags weren't shared with), and to manage write access (contributions) to a tag.

All this, I assume, is also what you do for collections. So then, all in all, how different from collections would tags really be?

Irrespective of the encryption questions, wouldn't the addition of tags complicate your domain model quite a bit? You'd likely also need new API endpoints, and separate UIs for viewing photos belonging to a tag (as opposed to an album), sharing a tag, editing/renaming tags, …

The way I've thought about this, we will not have "files inside tags", but we will have tags (foo, bar, baz) attached to a file as additional encrypted metadata.

We have existing client-side infrastructure[0] that can create auto-updating albums based on metadata, and this can be extended to enable sharing workflows.

[0]: https://ente.com/help/photos/features/albums-and-organizatio...

I'm not sure I understand yet. If tags (and the photos associated to them) are supposed to be shareable with others, how do you control read/write access to the tag if you don't use separate cryptographic keys? If you re-use/share existing keys (e.g. the parent album's collection keys), how do you ensure the recipients cannot read other photos or tag metadata not shared with them? What am I missing?

Once again thank you for taking the time to discuss this here! I appreciate it!

Happy to share my thoughts!

Current plan is to keep tags as part of an item's metadata, and allow sharing and access control with "smart albums" - that create a collection view over a tag-filter.

For eg. you can create a "smart album" for items that match the tags ["2020", "Holidays"]. Your devices will auto-add any items in your library that match these tags, to this collection. You can then share[0] this album with recipients who can view / add / auto-add items from their library.

Hope this makes sense!

[0]: https://ente.com/architecture/#sharing

Ahhh, now I see! Thanks!

> You can then share[0] this album with recipients who can view / add / auto-add items from their library.

IIUC, when a contributor uploads a photo, the owner of the smart album would need to do some client-side synchronization and 1) add the uploaded photo back to the original album and 2) add the tags ["2020", "Holidays"], so as to control write access to the original album & tag?

Either way, would these smart albums show up next to regular albums, though, or be "hidden"? I'm asking because what I would like to do, e.g., is to have a photo album for all our summer vacation photos and then create a subfolder (tag) for each family member to upload their photos in. If the smart albums all showed up in the top-level (flat) album list, I'd end up with a bunch of albums "2026 Summer vacation", "2026 Summer vacation - Alice's photos", "2026 Summer vacation - Bob's photos" all next to each other, which would kind of defeat the purpose in many ways.

Smart albums are collections that support rule based additions, as well as one-off additions. So a contributor can add photos directly to the collection, without the owner's clients not having to perform any extra computation. Also, for one-off additions, tags are irrelevant (the metadata of added items will stay unmodified).

Smart albums will show up next to regular albums, unless you hide / archive them. So you will unfortunately end up with multiple albums next to each other. For the workflow you've mentioned, we have plans to make albums where collaborators can only view the items they have added - so you could share "2026 Summer vacation" to collect photos from Bob and Alice, and you will be able to see photos added by everyone, while Bob and Alice will only be able to see theirs.

> Smart albums are collections that support rule based additions, as well as one-off additions. So a contributor can add photos directly to the collection, without the owner's clients not having to perform any extra computation.

What I meant was that if the smart album's purpose is allowing contributions to a tag in some other album, then contributed photos will have to be tagged & added to the original album by the owner, won't they, since only the owner holds the collection key.

> For the workflow you've mentioned, we have plans to make albums where collaborators can only view the items they have added

I'm not sure this would cover my use case. 1) I don't like other people's photos getting mixed up with mine for various reasons, which is why I typically set up one subfolder (or in Ente: a separate album) per contributor. 2) I want different people to have write access to their corresponding subfolder, but they should have read access to a larger set of subfolders (e.g. each others' photos, or maybe even the entire "summer vacation" album, though not necessarily).

All in all, the mechanisms you propose seem rather complex to me (and still inferior) compared to simply allowing albums/collections to be nested. And when I say "complex" I mean this not just from a technical point of view, but also from a conceptual & UX one. In the interview on YouTube you mention that a folder hierarchy might seem foreign to younger users but even if I believe that, is the solution really to come up with a solution that's foreign to everyone?

Besides, the entire industry has settled on nested folders as the primary way to organize files & documents as well as access control, from traditional file systems over Dropbox, M365 / SharePoint / One Drive to Confluence. So I'd say whoever is unfamiliar with that will become familiar fast, don't you think?

As someone who saw this and was interested but also skeptical of this being low effort are there other open projects for running small models locally on android / iOS?

I've found https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai but haven't tried anything in this space yet.

Google's AI Edge Gallery worked really well for me. It's still in early access.

How is this any different from Ollama plus Open Web UI?

None of that runs on an ios or android device.

> People called us crazy.

Absolutely no one called them crazy.

The (hn) title is misleading (unlike the actual title): It's an LLM _App_ not an LLM.

Please god stop letting LLMs write your copy. My brain just slides right over this slop. Perhaps you have a useful product but christ almighty I cannot countenance this boring machine generated text.

For the ones who tried this out but want to uninstall and remove the downloaded model, because it's an iPad app it's located here: /Users/username/Library/Containers/Ensu

Had used cactus before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524544

Then moved to pocket pal now for local llm.

hundreds of local llm apps exist

the what's next section acts novel but all of them have been achieved or created in some format already: you can run a local llm on a phone and connect it to a agent

Have you tried WebLLM? Or this wrapper: CodexLocal.com Basically, you would have a rather simple but capable LLM right in your browser using WebLLM and GPU

this is a weird HN thread, there's so many accounts spontaneously posting in here, both fairly new accounts and even aged accounts, with a mix of low karma and high-ish karma.. I spotted at least 5 suspicious accounts. There's 3 or 4 of them in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47517096 alone..

The content itself, the unexpectedly high rating and weird vibe in the comments smells like bot's manipulation. I hope mods take a look.

What do you mean by IA in your device ? is it a local LLM ? if yeas how much params 4B or 8B...?? device requirements not mentionned too

Looks like it checks your device specs and downloads whatever the best model that will work? On mine it’s using a 3.5b version of llama

The "What's next" section is more interesting than what shipped. A general-purpose chat wrapper around a 1-4B model occupies a crowded space — PocketPal, Jan, LMStudio, GPT4All all do similar things. But the ideas they gesture at (a persistent "second brain" note, an LLM-backed launcher, long-term memory that grows with you) are actually differentiated

I just use open claw as a local memory management system. Not sure from TFA what's new here.

Looks like something spun up by Claude Code without thorough testing or design behind it sadly.

I am surprised to see this on HN front page, there is no new information here, just an ad.

What's special about Ente?

How does it compare to Jan AI for example? or LM Studio? or ????

It's available on Android and iOS, and specifically on Play Store and Apple Store (so no "developer mode" hoops to jump through to install).

For local LLM there are Ollama and LM Studio. How is this different?

This seems like a great question to ask an offline llm that runs on your mobile device. Does ollama and Lm studio run on your mobile device?

Model is last trained on Dec 2023, that's consider outdated.

We hate big tech, because we want to become one ourselves!

This app isn't very useful but it did get me thinking.

I have a phone in a drawer I could install termux and ollama on over tailscale and then I'd have an always on llm for super light tasks.

I do really long for a private chat bot but I simply don't have access to the hardware required. Sadly I think it's going to be years to get there..

Installed it on a not-so-young laptop. It crashes immediately after launch. I blame the laptop.

If Ente is reading this : please add requirements to make it run (how many RAM, etc.)

beware of data rackets

> This is not the beginning, nor is this the end. This is just a checkpoint.

Come onnnnnn. I would rather read a one line "Check out our offline llm" rather than a whole press release of slop.

This looks very neat. I'm not familiar with the nitty gritty of AI so I really don't understand how it can reply so quickly running on an iPhone 16. But I'm not even going to bother searching for details because I don't want to read slop.

This sounds like an ad.

As do most of the associated comments. I think we're surrounded by bots.

I'm not a bot. Check my comment history and account age.

You sure were when you posted those comments, but now, we cannot be sure...

So you look down you see a tortoise. It's crawling towards you.

I mean I get it, astroturfing is a real problem and an annoying one for communities. But I also have no idea how to prove to you that I am neither a bot nor shilling here.

Don't worry, I was just joking about the future that await us.

agreed. i have never seen anyone (let alone an assortment) of hacker news users saying "i switched my 2fa to this after seeing how great it was!" Not really sure how one 'switches their 2fa' to an LLM...

This thread is about the 2FA app, not the LLM app. I don't care about the LLM app. What's this witch hunt? This app literally solved a (self-inflicted) problem I was having for some years now where I was keeping an old phone around just for MFA. I even thought about creating an iOS app that's compatible with Aegis files (actually I even _started_ working on that, but didn't get far) just to solve my problem. Now I don't have to, thanks to a comment here, and that's why I posted. Geez. I guess I'll stay with negative comments for the future, they seem to be more trustworthy.

Yea, everything about this post is just weird. IDK if they are even bots vs paid actors vs actual people who are clueless etc.

For sure. Getting shady vibes from ente. I’ll be avoiding them.

I am not a bot and I am not associated with this company in any way. But I am a happy user of Ente Auth as well. This AI thing they made however just gives off "we have to do something with AI or we'll be left behind" vibes.

It’s not pretending to not be an ad.

This looks amazing! As I learn and experiment more with local LLMs, I'm becoming more of a fan of local/offline LLMs. I believe there's a huge gap between local LLM based apps and commercial models like Claude/ChatGPT. Excited to see more apps leveraging local LLMs.

I'm working on a rather simple idea; a Wordpress plugin that allows you to use a local LLM inside your wordpress CMS.

It requires a Firefox add-on to act as a bridge: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ai-s-that-hel...

There is honestly not much to test just yet, but feel free to check it out here, provide feedback on the idea: https://codeberg.org/Helpalot/ais-that-helpalot

The essence works, I was able to let it make a simple summary on CMS content. So next is making it do something useful, and making it clear how other plugins could use it.

Spam? Ad?

Also: "Your AI agent can now create, edit, and manage content on WordPress.com" https://wordpress.com/blog/2026/03/20/ai-agent-manage-conten...

Spam for what? This is hackernews, I'm "hacking something" to push more control to users.

I'm talking about connecting Ollama to your wordpress.

Not via MCP or something that's complicated for a relatively normal user. But thanks for the link.

It seems your link about the Wordpress variation validated my idea :).

If the new Wordpress feature would allow for connecting to Ollama, then there is no need anymore for my plugin. But I don't see that in the current documentation.

So for now, I see my solution being superior for anyone who doesn't have a paid subscription, but has a decent laptop, that would like to use an LLM 'for free' (apart from power usage) with 100% privacy on their website.

> use a local LLM inside your wordpress CMS

For when wordpress doesn't have enough exploits and bugs as it is. Also why bother with wordpress in the first place if you're already having an LLM spit out content for you ?

What's your point? Don't use LLM for CMS content? That my code is buggy? Or that people shouldn't trust the LLM they run on their computer on their own website?

You can check the code for exploits yourself. And other than that it's just your LLM talking to your own website.

> Also why bother with wordpress in the first place

Weird question, but sure, I use WordPress, because I have a website that I want to run with a simple CMS that can also run my custom Wordpress plugins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com