the vision
Quiet. Private. Built to outlast its own building.
You already have a library. It's scattered across four thousand screenshots, a Safari reading list you stopped opening in 2023, voice memos with names like "New Recording 47", and eleven apps that each hold a piece of what you found worth keeping.
None of it comes back to you. Saving became a way of forgetting politely.
The tools weren't built to give things back. They were built to hold things, and holding was enough when storage was the hard part.
Storage stopped being the hard part. Attention is the hard part now, and attention is exactly what a saved article, a screenshot of a recipe, or a thought spoken into your watch was asking for. IKI exists to pay that debt: everything you save gets read, distilled into a card, connected to what you already know, and brought back when it matters.
That required two unfashionable decisions. The intelligence runs on your device, because a library where someone reads over your shoulder is not a library. And everything is stored as plain markdown files, because we've watched too many "forever" apps take a decade of saves down with them. Pocket gave its users three months to leave. We refuse to ever be in a position to make that offer.
file over app
That's not a risk we're hedging. It's the design goal.
the library rules
Nobody stands behind you at a bookshelf taking notes. The AI that reads your saves runs on your phone. Your library never touches our servers.
Your library is a folder of markdown files. Open it in the Files app, point Obsidian at it, back it up however you like. If IKI dies, your library doesn't.
No infinite scroll, no engagement metrics, no streaks. You take a book from the shelf, you put it back. The app is finished when you are.
You noticed something worth keeping. That was the hard part. Summaries, tags, connections and filing are on us, and they happen without being asked.
When you ask your library a question it can't answer, IKI says "your library doesn't cover this" instead of improvising. An index that lies is worse than no index.
A library card is not a login. IKI works the second you open it, offline, with nothing to register, verify or reset.
Two taps from anywhere: share sheet, Safari button, watch, widget. If saving takes effort, you'll stop saving. Every decision we add is a thing you'll abandon.
A save you never revisit is a pile. Every item becomes a typeset card with the gist, because the point of keeping things is meeting them again.
Share a collection as a beautiful page. Add a password and it's encrypted on your device before it leaves; we cannot read what you share.
While you sleep and the phone charges, IKI re-reads, connects and distills. You wake up to a denser library, not a todo list.
It's not a read-later queue that becomes a guilt list. It's not a second brain that needs weekly gardening. It's not a notes app with an AI button glued on. And it's not a platform: there are no followers, nothing trends, and nobody can see your library.
One person saves things all day. IKI is the other half of that person: the one who reads everything, remembers where it went, and occasionally slides a forgotten card across the desk at exactly the right moment.