Off Grid: Utilizing Phone Hardware for Offline AI Applications

Off Grid is an open-source application designed to utilize the powerful GPU in your smartphone to perform AI tasks offline, without relying on cloud services. This includes text generation using llama.cpp at 15-30 tokens per second with any GGUF model, image generation with Stable Diffusion running NPU-accelerated on Snapdragon NPUs taking 5-10 seconds per image, voice transcription with Whisper, and vision AI with models like SmolVLM and Qwen3-VL.

The app operates entirely offline, ensuring no data leaves your device, which is particularly crucial in scenarios with no internet access, such as flights, in countries with censorship, or in compliance-heavy environments like hospitals. For Android, the app is available as an APK from GitHub, while iOS users need to build the app from source code.

To run Off Grid, Android users should use npm install followed by cd android && ./gradlew clean && cd .. and npm run android. iOS setup requires cd ios && pod install && cd .. and npm run ios. Ensure Node.js 20+ and Xcode 15+ for iOS, or JDK 17 and Android SDK 34 for Android are installed. This type of offline capability is particularly useful for developers concerned about data privacy and those working in internet-restricted or data-sensitive environments.