Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

by matthiaswh • 4 months ago

361 178 4 months ago

moqster• 4 months ago

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...

_factor• 4 months ago

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?

ahofmann3• 4 months ago

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.

yolo_4202• 4 months ago

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.

zaphod12• 4 months ago

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

deltoidmaximus• 4 months ago

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

utopiah• 4 months ago

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?

testdelacc13• 4 months ago

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!”

ignoramous2• 4 months ago

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/

mschulze4• 4 months ago

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 :)

dmboyd• 4 months ago

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.

sylens• 4 months ago

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

dotancohen2• 4 months ago

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.

moontear• 4 months ago

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.

VladVladikoff• 4 months ago

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

hellcow• 4 months ago

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.

NitpickLawyer• 4 months ago

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

embedding-shape3• 4 months ago

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?

sync• 4 months ago

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...

woadwarrior01• 4 months ago

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

ahofmann3• 4 months ago

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

juliushuijnk4• 4 months ago

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.

HelloUsername• 4 months ago

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...

juliushuijnk4• 4 months ago

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.

bilekas• 4 months ago

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 ?

juliushuijnk4• 4 months ago

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.

chocks• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Weird hype going on here in comments.

kylehotchkiss2• 4 months ago

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.

alterom8• 4 months ago

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.

nathan_compton• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

if you are into local LLMs check out apfel

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

Apple Ai on the command line

echion• 4 months ago

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

hmokiguess• 4 months ago

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

koehr• 4 months ago

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.

sunaookami• 4 months ago

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

giuscri• 4 months ago

what’s embarrassing about that?

glitchc• 4 months ago

This sounds like an ad.

gwerbret• 4 months ago

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

mschulze4• 4 months ago

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

vaporwario• 4 months ago

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...

NewsaHackO• 4 months ago

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

testdelacc13• 4 months ago

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

Fervicus• 4 months ago

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.

jimbokun5• 4 months ago

It’s not pretending to not be an ad.

mkagenius• 4 months ago

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

Then moved to pocket pal now for local llm.

dgb233• 4 months ago

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

post-it2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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

kennywinker5• 4 months ago

None of that runs on an ios or android device.

jubilanti2• 4 months ago

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.

bee_rider• 4 months ago

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.

gardnr• 4 months ago

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

cdrnsf2• 4 months ago

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

alterom8• 4 months ago

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.

cdrnsf2• 4 months ago

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

FitchApps• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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

alterom8• 4 months ago

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?

lone-cloud3• 4 months ago

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

H8crilA• 4 months ago

Someone still has to.

alterom8• 4 months ago

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.

lone-cloud3• 4 months ago

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

jimbokun5• 4 months ago

Why didn’t you?

lone-cloud3• 4 months ago

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

imadch• 4 months ago

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

kennywinker5• 4 months ago

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

jasongill2• 4 months ago

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

cromka2• 4 months ago

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

jasongill2• 4 months ago

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.

kelvinjps10• 4 months ago

Well ente photos is the one that provides the funding

tim-projects• 4 months ago

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..

FusionX• 4 months ago

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.

jubilanti2• 4 months ago

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.

cyanydeez• 4 months ago

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.

chatmasta• 4 months ago

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

post-it2• 4 months ago

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.

reactordev• 4 months ago

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

Barbing4• 4 months ago

All about immich now right?

buster2• 4 months ago

What do you when you say defunct photos platform?

fauigerzigerk• 4 months ago

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

i80and• 4 months ago

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)

PhilipRoman• 4 months ago

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

kylehotchkiss2• 4 months ago

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.

collabs• 4 months ago

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.

jermaustin1• 4 months ago

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.

nozzlegear2• 4 months ago

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

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

ttul2• 4 months ago

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.

Barbing4• 4 months ago

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

usrusr• 4 months ago

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

prism56• 4 months ago

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.

jimbokun5• 4 months ago

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

moffkalast• 4 months ago

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.

jimbokun5• 4 months ago

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.

BaudouinVH• 4 months ago

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.)

xtracto4• 4 months ago

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.

xtracto4• 4 months ago

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

kennywinker5• 4 months ago

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

xtracto4• 4 months ago

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.

antipaul• 4 months ago

https://psyche.network/runs

mijkal• 4 months ago

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

sbassi• 4 months ago

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

kennywinker5• 4 months ago

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?

vvilliamperez• 4 months ago

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

daikon899• 4 months ago

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

pulkitsh1234• 4 months ago

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

getpokedagain• 4 months ago

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.

stressback• 4 months ago

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

RandomGerm4n• 4 months ago

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.

drak0n1c• 4 months ago

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

jimmyjazz14• 4 months ago

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

selfawareMammal• 4 months ago

People called us crazy.

Absolutely no one called them crazy.

razvan_maftei• 4 months ago

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

tmanderson• 4 months ago

beware of data rackets

socalgal2• 4 months ago

What's special about Ente?

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

alterom8• 4 months ago

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).

buster2• 4 months ago

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.

alterom8• 4 months ago

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.

MillironX• 4 months ago

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

todotask2• 4 months ago

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

sneak• 4 months ago

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.

vishnukvmd7• 4 months ago

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

We'd like to fix the crashes.

Sorry for the troubles.

gverrilla• 4 months ago

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

codethief7• 4 months ago

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...

vishnukvmd7• 4 months ago

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.

codethief7• 4 months ago

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...

fouc• 4 months ago

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..

treexs• 4 months ago

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

omdv• 4 months ago

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

qprofyeh• 4 months ago

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

Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

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