We wanted to build something for Apple.
Private by design, not by promise.
We wanted this project to feel like it truly belonged on the iPhone, not just work on it. That meant getting into the frameworks and APIs Apple builds specifically for privacy, reliability, and the details that make an experience feel like it was built for the device, not adapted to it.
Elly gave us a reason to work with Apple's Foundation Models framework1, which powers on-device AI through Apple Intelligence and runs entirely on the phone. Names, notes, and coffee orders never leave the device. And because it's built on Apple's own framework, Elly keeps improving as Apple Intelligence does.
1. Foundation Models is Apple's on-device generative AI framework. Click the link to visit the relevant Apple documentation.
Four frameworks doing the heavy lifting.
Apple Intelligence runs the language model right on your phone. Every question you ask about your people, and every answer Elly gives, is computed locally and never sent to a server. Because it's Apple's own framework, the capability deepens with each release of Apple Intelligence.
Elly starts from the people already in your phone (names, faces, and the relationships between them) rather than asking you to rebuild a database by hand. The contacts you already maintain become the foundation Elly remembers against.
Elly reads what's playing in Apple Music, so a song someone introduced you to, or an album you heard together, becomes one more detail worth holding onto, context that makes a memory feel specific instead of generic.
The entire data layer is your own iCloud. No accounts to create, no servers of ours, nothing in the middle. Everything syncs privately across your devices, and because there's no backend to operate, there's nothing for us to see or store.
1. Foundation Models — on-device generative AI. Read the documentation.
2. Contacts — the system people database. Read the documentation.
3. MusicKit — Apple Music integration. Read the documentation.
4. CloudKit — iCloud sync and storage. Read the documentation.
Small apps, made with care.
Elly takes after focused tools like Flighty1: apps that lean all the way into iOS and its new Liquid Glass material. They focus on solving one problem well.
Ours is a human one: remembering the people who matter. Walk past a Starbucks and Elly reminds you your partner takes an oat milk vanilla latte, the moment it’s useful.
1. Flighty is a flight-tracking app for iOS, admired for its native design. Click the link to visit it.
We go deep on Apple's platforms.
Elly is one app, but it points to something larger. More & More builds for iOS and macOS, staying close to WWDC and the frameworks Apple ships each year, so our work is current the day it launches.