Disclosure: we make Pinku, the app ranked first here. What we say about the other apps comes from their own App Store pages and Apple's public lookup API, checked on 7 October 2026.
ChatGPT needs three things: a connection, an account and a country where OpenAI offers it. The apps below need none of the three once their model is on your iPhone. They download an open language model once and run it on the phone itself, so they keep working on a plane, with no signal, and in places where ChatGPT is not available.
The ranking
- Pinku: best overall, and the widest availability.
- Locally AI by LM Studio: best free option, if it is in your store.
- Private LLM: best if you would rather pay once upfront.
- PocketPal AI: best free, open-source option for any model.
- Enclave: best if you also want ChatGPT-style cloud models when you are online.
Why Pinku is #1
- On-device: after a one-time model download, it answers with no connection at all, on a plane or with no signal.
- No account, no sign-up, no country check. Its App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected, and no data leaves the device.
- In the App Store in Russia, mainland China and Hong Kong, where ChatGPT is not offered, and the interface speaks Russian and Simplified Chinese among 8 languages.
- An alternative download source for when Hugging Face is slow or blocked.
- Free to start; Pinku Pro is a one-time $9.99 purchase. No subscription.
- A memory check before loading, so a model too big for your phone does not crash the app.
Where ChatGPT is not available
OpenAI publishes a list of the countries where ChatGPT is supported. Russia, mainland China and Hong Kong are not on it. An app that runs on the device does not depend on that list, only on being in your country's App Store. On 7 October 2026, Apple's lookup API showed:
| Price (US) | Russia | Mainland China | Hong Kong | Rating (US) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Pinku (ours) | Free; Pro $9.99 one-time | Yes | Yes | Yes | 4.7 · 12 |
| 2. Locally AI | Free | No | No | Yes | 4.7 · 1,740 |
| 3. Private LLM | $4.99 upfront | Yes | Yes | Yes | 4.2 · 734 |
| 4. PocketPal AI | Free, open source | Yes | Yes | Yes | 4.1 · 160 |
| 5. Enclave | Free; Pro $9.99 | Yes | No | Yes | 4.7 · 1,087 |
Store availability changes, and it depends on the developer's choices, not ours. If an app does not show up in your store, the table shows whether it is sold there. Ratings and availability from Apple's public lookup API on 7 October 2026.
What you give up compared with ChatGPT
Honestly: a lot of raw capability. A model that fits on a phone weighs between a few hundred megabytes and a few gigabytes; the models behind ChatGPT run on data centres. Offline apps have no web search, so they know nothing that happened after their model was trained. Context is shorter, answers are slower on older iPhones, and none of these apps generate images.
What small models do well is the everyday work: rewriting a paragraph, drafting a message, summarising text you paste, translating, explaining a concept, brainstorming. For that, an answer that arrives with no connection and leaves no copy on anyone's server is often the better trade.
1. Pinku
Pinku runs twelve curated open models (Gemma 3, Gemma 3n, Llama 3.2, Qwen3, DeepSeek-R1 distills, SmolLM3 and LFM2) on iPhone, iPad and Mac with Apple MLX. No account, no server, nothing sent anywhere. It is in the App Store in all three countries above, its interface is in English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Russian, and an “alternative download source” setting fetches models through a mirror when Hugging Face is slow or unreachable. The six models up to 1 GB are free; Pinku Pro ($9.99, once) adds six larger ones, custom instructions and on-device voice. Where others beat it: no image or document input, a curated list rather than any model, and no sync between devices.
2. Locally AI by LM Studio
Free, no login, Apple MLX, image understanding, iPhone, iPad and Mac, and the most ratings of any app here. The catch for this article: on 7 October 2026 it was not in the Russian or mainland Chinese App Store.
3. Private LLM
$4.99 once, with Family Sharing, on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Larger models than most (up to 14B parameters on a Mac) and Siri and Shortcuts integration. Available in all three stores.
4. PocketPal AI
Free and open source. It runs any GGUF model you find on Hugging Face, which is the most flexibility and the most work: picking a model that fits your phone is up to you, and in places where Hugging Face is hard to reach, so is the download.
5. Enclave
Free for local models, with documents, voice, custom assistants, Siri and Shortcuts. Its description presents Pro as a subscription that adds cloud models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI: useful when you are online, but those requests are not offline and not on the device. Not in the mainland Chinese store on 7 October 2026.
Set it up before you need it
- Download on Wi-Fi first. The model download is the one step that needs the internet. Do it at home, not at the gate.
- Start small on an iPhone. A model under 1 GB loads fast and leaves memory for everything else.
- Test it in Airplane Mode. If it still answers, it really is running on the phone.
For the full field, including Privacy AI and Mac support, see the best offline AI chat apps for iPhone and Mac.