Helvi and Own AI Now Have Their Own Websites
Two of my iPhone apps moved out of my portfolio and onto their own domains. helvi.online is for finding what's on in Switzerland, ownai.online is for running AI models on your phone without sending anything anywhere.
Two of my apps now have their own homes on the web: helvi.online for Helvi, and ownai.online for Own AI.
Until now both lived as a page inside this portfolio, next to everything else I’ve shipped. That worked for a list, but neither app is really a list item. Each one has a few things worth showing properly, and a link you can send to someone who has never heard of me. So they got their own domains, their own pages, and their own privacy policy and terms.
Helvi: what’s on this weekend
Helvi is a catalogue of events across Switzerland. Family days out, village markets, festivals, concerts, the odd alpine thing you only hear about if you know someone local. Right now it has more than 210 upcoming events across 90-plus towns and cities, and it isn’t limited to Zürich and Geneva.
The part I care most about is the part before you’ve decided anything. The feed starts with the questions people really ask: what’s on this weekend, what’s near me, what’s free. Open an event and you get the dates, the venue, the prices and a countdown, then a day itinerary, reminders and a packing list if you want them. There’s a map where every event is a pin, and a month view with a dot on each day something is happening.
A few smaller things that I’m fond of:
- Search treats Genf, Genève and Ginevra as the same place, because in Switzerland they are.
- The app and the event details come in English, German, French and Italian.
- Event pages show parking, step-free access, family facilities, food and the weather forecast.
- A home screen widget counts down the days to your next event.
- You can put two events side by side when you can’t pick.
It’s free, it has no ads, and an account is optional (you only need one if you want favourites synced between devices). It needs iOS 18 or later, and it’s on the Swiss App Store.
Own AI: a language model that lives on the phone
Own AI runs language and vision models on the iPhone itself. Your question, your documents, your photos and your voice get processed on the device, so there’s no prompt going to a model provider, because there is no model provider in the loop. There’s no account to make either.
The app ships with a small Qwen3 0.6B model already inside, so the first chat works with no download. From there you can pick from a catalogue of 88 MLX models across 13 families, some under 1 GB, some that only make sense on an iPad Pro or a Mac. You can also search Hugging Face for community models. Each one is checked against your device before it downloads (architecture, files, chat template, quantization, memory), and a short self-test afterwards proves it loads and replies.
What it does with them:
- Documents. Attach PDFs, DOCX, TXT, RTF or code files and ask questions. Retrieval runs on the phone and the answer shows which pages it drew from.
- Math. Answers render LaTeX, group derivations into steps, and open in a formula inspector that can plot in 2D and 3D.
- Voice. Speech recognition on the device, and replies read aloud by local text-to-speech.
- Study sets. A document becomes flashcards and quizzes, each with its source quote, coming back after 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30 days.
- Siri, Shortcuts, widgets and an Apple Watch companion, for when you don’t want to open the app.
Only two things ever touch the network: a model you choose to download, and a web search you choose to run. With a local model everything else works in airplane mode, which is the quickest way to check I’m not making this up.
It’s free with a daily allowance of up to five messages, and Pro lifts the limits. It needs iOS 18, and an A14 chip or newer (iPhone 12 or later) to run local models. The interface comes in English, German, Spanish and French.
Why separate sites
Mostly because the pages can be honest about one thing at a time. The Own AI page has a section on how the engine keeps memory under control on a phone, with small animations, which would be strange inside a general portfolio. The Helvi page shows real events from the catalogue, which is much more convincing than a screenshot and a paragraph.
It also means each app has a stable address and its own legal pages, which is what App Store listings and support links ought to point at.
This portfolio keeps the full list of what I’ve built, and both apps are still on the apps page.
If you try either one and something is unclear, broken or missing, the contact page is the way to tell me.