Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

matthiaswh 346 points 159 comments March 25, 2026
ente.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

moqster

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...

VladVladikoff

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

juliushuijnk

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.

chocks

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.

netfl0

Weird hype going on here in comments.

nathan_compton

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.

franze

if you are into local LLMs check out apfel https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel Apple Ai on the command line

koehr

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.

mkagenius

Had used cactus before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524544 Then moved to pocket pal now for local llm.

dgb23

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

post-it

> 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.

maxloh

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

talking_penguin

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

jubilanti

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.

cdrnsf

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

FitchApps

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

emehex

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

lone-cloud

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

imadch

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

jasongill

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

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