Raycast brings its super-powerful Mac launcher to iOS, sort of
- Raycast, a powerful Mac launcher, has finally arrived on iOS, albeit in a more limited form.
- The app’s developers had to figure out what features to include and how to adapt them for mobile devices, which was a challenge in itself.
- The first iteration of the app focuses on two popular Raycast features: AI-powered chatbot integration and voice or camera-based interactions.
- Users can use the chatbot to sync conversations across devices and enjoy a familiar interface on their iPhone or iPad.
- The iOS version of Raycast is launching today, marking a significant milestone for the app’s mobile debut.
Raycast users have been asking the app’s developers for an iOS app for a long time. It took a while, though, for the developers to figure out exactly what that app was supposed to do. See, on a Mac (and soon a Windows PC), Raycast is a hugely powerful tool for navigating your computer. You can use it to launch apps, change settings, execute commands, control the layout of your windows, and dozens of other features. Much of that is irrelevant on a phone, and some of it is just simply not allowed. Actually building the Raycast iOS app was, in many ways, easier than figuring out why to build it in the first place.
The first iteration of the app, which is launching today for iPhone and iPad, leans heavily on two of Raycast’s more popular features. The first is AI: Raycast has a built-in chatbot that integrates a number of different models, and you can use the same chat on your phone. You can also use your phone’s camera to attach a photo to the chat, or speak to the bot via voice. There are plenty of iOS apps for talking to AI, of course, but Raycast co-founder Petr Nikolaev says users wanted a way to sync their conversations, and a familiar interface for doing it on mobile.
The oth …
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