Raycast users have been asking the app’s developers for an iOS app for a long time. It took a while, though, for the developers to figure out exactly what that app was supposed to do. See, on a Mac (and soon a Windows PC), Raycast is a hugely powerful tool for navigating your computer. You can use it to launch apps, change settings, execute commands, control the layout of your windows, and dozens of other features. Much of that is irrelevant on a phone, and some of it is just simply not allowed. Actually building the Raycast iOS app was, in many ways, easier than figuring out why to build it in the first place.
The first iteration of the app, which is launching today for iPhone and iPad, leans heavily on two of Raycast’s more popular features. The first is AI: Raycast has a built-in chatbot that integrates a number of different models, and you can use the same chat on your phone. You can also use your phone’s camera to attach a photo to the chat, or speak to the bot via voice. There are plenty of iOS apps for talking to AI, of course, but Raycast co-founder Petr Nikolaev says users wanted a way to sync their conversations, and a familiar interface for doing it on mobile.
The other key feature of Raycast for iOS is Raycast Notes, a barebones note-taking system that syncs across platforms. Notes in Raycast’s desktop app got a big upgrade relatively recently, and co-founder Thomas Paul Mann says mobile requests immediately went up afterwards. “It’s the first content people are creating and storing in Raycast,” he says, “and people want to have it on the go.”
There are other features in the app, like a Quicklinks page that you can use to quickly navigate to a URL or another app, and a Snippets page for storing frequently-used bits of text. These are hugely useful desktop features — Raycast is an excellent text-expansion app across the Mac, and you can use its URL scheme to go almost anywhere — but they’re limited on mobile by what Apple’s siloed platform allows.
That’s pretty much the app so far. The team’s goal was just to put something in front of users, to see how they use it and what else they might want. Inside the company, the possible roadmap appears to be long: Mann and Nikolaev both happily rattle off some of the things they’re thinking about adding to the app now that it’s out. They’re particularly excited about the idea of a custom keyboard, which you could bring up in other apps and easily access snippets and other bits of information. They also want to replicate Focus, a feature that lets you block apps and websites so you can get stuff done.
One huge unknown lingers over all these plans: how much will Apple let Raycast do on iOS? The co-founders would love to bring support for Raycast Extensions, which let you use Raycast to add and retrieve information from other apps, but they think Apple likely won’t allow it because it’ll look like an app store inside an app. Raycast can replace Spotlight on a Mac, but nothing can replace Spotlight on an iPhone, so they’re not sure how much it makes sense as an app launcher either. They’re supporting the Action Button, Control Center, and other surfaces on iOS, but there’s still no way to make Raycast AI as easy as Siri. Given all that, how useful can Raycast really be?
An obvious solution to these problems would be to build the app for Android, a much more open platform. Nikolaev says they’re thinking about it – the idea of building a full system launcher is pretty appealing — but the company is just better equipped to make Apple apps right now. “We want to see how iOS goes,” Nikolaev says. “So tell your friends, make it popular! If it’s successful, we’ll make it on Android.”
For now, the team is talking about the mobile app mostly as a companion to the desktop app, a way to sync some information across devices. But Raycast works precisely because it can change the way you do almost everything. It would clearly like to do the same for phones. If only it’s allowed to.
