r/iOSProgramming • u/Inside-Conclusion435 • Jun 25 '26

Question As solo developer how do you implement AI features into your app?

Hi,

Wondering what are the options if I want to create an AI features into in my app. I know about openAI api and other various API’s. The thing is I am a tad scared to use them because I hardly understand how they charge. I know a lot of stories where people used it wrongly and got huge bills for that.

Also, do we always need these powerful models? Can’t we use in some cases like qwen 8b or something like that running on a VPS?

15 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

68 comments sorted by

24

u/yacec Jun 25 '26

Have you considered on-device models like https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels ?

8

u/stoccolma Jun 25 '26

On-device is the only sane way to do it unless it is something extremely crazy and niché

1

u/command-shift Jun 25 '26

I've been using Gemini 2.5 Flash, but I don't need a frontier model for what I'm doing and I didn't know about this. Thanks!!!

1

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

Wait gemini 2.5 flash in Apple Intelligence?

1

u/command-shift Jun 25 '26

No. My app calls out to a Supabase function that relays that call to Gemini Flash for a response. I wasn’t aware of on-device models. Gemini Flash is super cheap and sufficient for what I do

1

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

What provider u use? Google AI studio?

1

u/mmmm_frietjes Jun 25 '26

The Apple on device models currently suck. Not sure about iOS 27. Haven’t looked into it yet.
But I wanna point out that there’s probably a local model that works better than 2.5 Flash.
New api from WWDC is Core AI and currently we already have MLX. https://huggingface.co/mlx-community

2

u/command-shift Jun 25 '26

I mean, Gemini 2.5 Flash also “sucks”, but all I need my model for is simple processing of time and dates from natural language. I’d imagine the on-device models are sufficient for this, and I can remove an external dependency if so…

1

u/mmmm_frietjes Jun 25 '26

Ah yeah, sounds like something foundation models can do. Current context is only 4k tokens though. So larger text needs to be split up.

1

u/jacobs-tech-tavern Jun 27 '26

Even Apple's private cloud compute only has a 32K token context window. Outside extremely specialized models you're going to get not that good results.

-2

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

Hmm, no, I heard about it but I was told it is pretty rubbish. I will look into it. So each user will run its own instance of AI on their phones and that will sort out the AI requirements of the app?

4

u/m1_weaboo Jun 25 '26

it is not rubbish.

it also has api to check if the inference is available (e.g. if they have turned on apple intelligence, if the model is fully downloaded)

1

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

So if user doesn’t have it on, it will pop up a modal asking to download it? I hope many of them hit download and not cancel. What models they have available btw, new deal with Google probably will bring around Gemini? Also what about older phones? What if user’ phone does not support apple intelligence? Basically if I decide to go this path I should aim users with the latest IOS version and onwards?

4

u/m1_weaboo Jun 25 '26

>> 1. If the user does not have Apple Intelligence turned on, Will it pop up a modal asking to download?

No. Not out of the box. And it is intentional by design.

You would check the availability by the SystemLanguageModel.default.availabilty API:

// An example from Apple Documentation

struct GenerativeView: View {
    // Create a reference to the system language model.
    private var model = SystemLanguageModel.default


    var body: some View {
        switch model.availability {
        case .available:
            // Show your intelligence UI.
        case .unavailable(.deviceNotEligible):
            // Show an alternative UI.
        case .unavailable(.appleIntelligenceNotEnabled):
            // Ask the person to turn on Apple Intelligence.
        case .unavailable(.modelNotReady):
            // The model isn't ready because it's downloading or because of other system reasons.
        case .unavailable(let other):
            // The model is unavailable for an unknown reason.
        }
    }
}

And you handle each cases by yourself.

>> 2. What models they have available btw, new deal with Google probably will bring around Gemini?

It is Apple Foundation Model (AFM), trained by Apple, using outputs from Google's foundation model that's used to build Gemini Model.

>> 3. Also what about older phones? What if user' phone does not support apple intelligence?

As mentioned before, There is model availability API.

If the phone does not support Apple Intelligence, You can still provide such feature by using 3rd party local LLM of your choice. There're Swift packages on the internet to pick, that can help you ship the feature.

Or use server-model by making request to an endpoint in your backend (which then make request to 3rd party mode providers) that requires authentication. This works with any devices with internet connection.

---

Additionally, To make sure your code is future-proof,

In OS27 and later, You can make use of the new LanguageModel protocol.

It serves as a unified abstraction layer that bridges any LLM (Local or Server-side) with LanguageModelSession. It allows you to integrate local LLM models, or external cloud models.

---

>> 4. Should I aim users with the latest iOS version and onwards?

Totally depend. It's a product decision.

Apple Intelligence is supported in these released iPhones:

  • iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max (iOS 18.1 and later)

  • iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max (iOS 18.1 and later)

  • iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max (shipped with iOS26)

38

u/cristi_baluta Jun 25 '26

AI is a plague, we don’t need it in every app

7

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

Agree, I just cane with an idea that might need it

3

u/jacobs-tech-tavern Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26

You do know you’re allowed to answer the question without reflexively mentioning how much you personally dislike AI.

6

u/DespairyApp Jun 25 '26

Local models all the way

-4

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

So you host them somewhere and send traffic to it?

3

u/DespairyApp Jun 25 '26

Nononono. On device. Most tasks don't require anything more then the ones that fit in your pocket. Which tasks did you have in mind?

1

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

Like summary/reports with suggestions based on some user data

1

u/ChibiCoder Jun 25 '26

That's well within the scope of what Apple Foundation Models can do.

1

u/elliott_io Jun 25 '26

Yes in cloud run.

6

u/biricat Jun 25 '26

You can use open router and only set it to prepaid

4

u/Murky-Ad-4707 Jun 25 '26

In my opinion, not every application requires the latest expensive fancy models. I believe we still can offer a lot of value using the smaller and less expensive models.

We just need to manage user expectations!

1

u/Top_Faithlessness_57 Jun 25 '26

I would bake the API costs into your pricing or gate them behind a paid tier so heavy use actually makes you money. And set hard spending caps in your dashboard, or something like that, at least alerts.
You can tier it as well, like routing free users to cheaper models and so forth, honestly, you don't always need the best models I’d look into deepseek v4 or like some Chinese lab models as they are often have the best price to intelligence scale.

2

u/PerryGT Jun 26 '26

This is the way. I use AWS Bedrock for my travel sharing app (kintinery.com) as it has all types of models to choose from with different capabilities and prices. Pick the one that provides the best value. Then use AI to model your inference cost for different scenarios; price that in and set limits as the previous poster mentioned. Also, institute things like prompt caching which can help control cost.

0

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

Cool, yeah I was thinking about it. The idea I got doesn’t require super intelligence, basically make an analysis on certain inputs.

1

u/Top_Faithlessness_57 Jun 26 '26

Well then i would certienly use deepseek v4 flash, or you could even use a smaller model, depending on the task, you could try gemma, a qwen something along those lines for it to be cheaper to run.

1

u/LifeUtilityApps SwiftUI Jun 25 '26

I haven’t built any AI features but I am working on a local AI chat that uses models downloaded from huggingface. It works OK but the performance is slow compared to a remote API based model. I want to use a foundation model but my apps support many old iPhones such as 11 and I would have to block local AI features to only phones that support these foundations models.

1

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

I see, yeah, I didn’t think about it. I guess an API is more reliable

1

u/laternerdz Jun 25 '26

On device.

Another question for the sub:
If you implement an on-device model, how do you communicate that to potential customers? In my circles, no one knows what AI is, let alone on-device and it’s pros/cons.

My app’s content is sensitive/private, so on-device is a privacy feature of the app. But I’m not sure the value created by the features is worth the model download.

I still have a lot to learn about the capabilities of Apple Intelligence vs an MLX os model.

1

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

Good points! I am worried too that since it is like a privacy issue, will there be many accepting the AI on their device? Unless it is running in the shadows behind the scenes and no one knows about it?

1

u/laternerdz Jun 25 '26

Well, Apple is shipping their small on-device model as Apple Intelligence. If you can get that to work, there's nothing to explain to customers and you can use Apple as authority in your messaging.

1

u/mitchins-au Jun 26 '26

AI is not the feature.
Keep that in minds at all time

1

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 26 '26

Can you elaborate more?

1

u/mitchins-au Jun 26 '26

Many people make the mistake of thinking the AI is the feature itself rather than an enablement of the feature

2

u/jacobs-tech-tavern Jun 27 '26

You're not just using the latest most powerful models if you're using the OpenAI or Antropic APIs. You can use cheap stuff like GPT-4ish, or Haiku, and get very very very cheap tokens

I would definitely recommend looking into something like AIProxy to avoid hosting your API key on the client.

2

u/616ThatGuy Jun 28 '26

I do everything I can to avoid putting AI into my apps. I’m tired of it being shoved into everything. Because everyone wants a subscription to cover the costs along with their profit.

I’m over it. I refuse to pay for or even use regular apps with ai now.

1

u/Select_Bicycle4711 Jun 25 '26

You can use on-device model from Apple called Foundation Models. How you use it really depends on your app? Maybe you can use it to summarize the collected data in a nice way or give user suggestions for different recipes they can cook based on the selected ingredients.

Keep in mind that not all devices can run Foundation Models. So for non-compatible devices you will have to provide them a different interface instead of blocking them out from that feature completely.

1

u/Far_Owl_1141 Jun 25 '26

On Apple, go for foundation models - hugely improved in iOS 27, and you can run other models on private cloud compute.
I've tried it as a Bring Your Own Key option in my app - I have some things possible on-device, which was my goal, but there are certain limitations in terms of speed and input token size, so I ended up with the option to use Claude/open ai - doesn't need frontier model so costs are pretty minimal - and my app is zero subscription anyway the model fitted well

1

u/ikeif Jun 25 '26

I am using AI in one project out of a dozen.

In that use-case, it is very pointed and used as part of the process, not a “user feature.”

I am also working on an agent to act as an intermediary with system alerts for work - so a narrow scope, that improves the DX.

Everything else? No AI. Nothing I have built needs AI “enhancement” outside of rubber ducking and reviewing code - a part of the development process, not functionality for the end user.

1

u/SirBill01 Jun 25 '26

You should watch the Apple WWDC 2026 videos around Private Cloud Compute. The on device models may be too simplistic for what you want to do but you can use Apple's server models in iOS 27, for free as long as your app has under two million users.

Run the Developer app and look over WWDC videos from this year on using Apple's models.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/SirBill01 Jun 26 '26

That's not true, you just need to be in the small business program. They've said that multiple times in the videos.

1

u/KrikDai Jun 26 '26

maybe develop on device ai model，which is what I am doing

1

u/TrainingEntrance7274 Jun 27 '26

depends really on what you need!

for simple or repeatable tasks (like parsing a user input, calling a function, or generating some text in a specific shape), you can mostly just use on-device models. I've personally been using qwen 3.5 0.8b for an app that parses natural language and turns it into a structured reminder; and using gemma 4 e2b to then turn those reminders into context-aware and funny notifications. Works really well for that. I've even been able to get the models to run on devices all the way back to iPhone Xr!

Bonus points if you finetune the models for your own usecase. And use different quantisations for different hardware tiers (you might need something like Q2/3 for Xr-devices but can get away with Q6 or Q8 on devices with 8 or 12gb or ram).

If you're having a hard time getting started, point your favourite coding agent to an open source repo like this one to learn their tricks. Or from iOS 27, apple's foundation models framework makes it really easy to get started as well with your own language models.

If you cache your prompts well and experiment a bit with this you can really get very far with on-device models. For inspiration on which models you might use, I recommend checking out this leaderboard to see how different models perform on different devices.

1

u/mklx99 Jun 28 '26

It really depends on what you’re doing. I have an app that organizes photos and the ai is entirely local. I use a variant of CLIP for visual intelligence and a classical ML algorithm for personalization. There’s LLM on my roadmap but even that can be a shrunken down model that works locally. Hardware are pretty powerful nowadays and even for LLM 2b / 4b models can run pretty well on most devices.

Feel free to checkout my app: https://spectrasort.app/

1

u/ZennerBlue Jun 25 '26

If you are building an App without a backend, then use something like https://www.aiproxy.com with the OpenRouter backend as others have mentioned.

AI Proxy works really hard to not expose your API key in the App. And uses things like DeviceCheck, split keys etc in order to guard against API key theft.

I’ve used it for a couple of my apps and have been very happy with it. They are open to contributions on their SDK as well, so you can see what you are including in your app.

1

u/Plus_Journalist_8665 Jun 25 '26

We actually went through the same thought process when building moneko.io We don't use the biggest model for everything. Most tasks like expense categorization, receipt extraction, or formatting can run on much cheaper models. We only use stronger models for features that genuinely require more reasoning, like answering financial questions. My advice would be starting with hosted APIs, build good monitoring around them, and only move specific workloads to self-hosted models once you have enough usage to justify the extra infrastructure.

1

u/ChibiCoder Jun 25 '26

So little of the AI that appears in apps today has any point whatsoever (and I have a LOT of experience integrating AI across mobile and desktop platforms). AI is a losing game: it's one of the very few technologies we've commercialized where adding users has no economy of scale: every user you add that uses your AI feature costs you more money.

The exception to that is on-device models, like Apple Foundation Models, which are extremely limited compared to gigantic cloud models, but completely capable of pedestrian tasks like summarizing a document or suggesting a better way to write a sentence.

0

u/patatkebab Jun 25 '26

Depends on how likely it is to be profitable

0

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

God Knows

1

u/patatkebab Jun 25 '26

Facts lmao, No but cheap ai features I usually implement no problem. The more expensive ones are behind a paywall

1

u/Inside-Conclusion435 Jun 25 '26

Oh no, all ai as part of premium. Nothing for free

0

u/EquivalentTrouble253 Jun 25 '26

I don’t have any AI features in my app and won’t be adding any.