Your Phone Is Now an Inbox for Your AI's Memory

Hjarni is now on your phone. The apps are live on the App Store and Google Play, free on both. It is the same Hjarni you already use: a Markdown knowledge base with a built-in MCP server, so a note you write on your phone is a note Claude or ChatGPT can read at your desk.

The idea you had at the wrong moment

Good thinking does not wait for you to be at a keyboard.

You work something out on a walk. A friend tells you the name of the one supplier who is actually reliable. You leave a doctor's appointment holding three facts you will want in six months. A number lands in a meeting that changes what you were planning to do next.

At that moment you have a phone in your hand and about ten seconds of willingness. So it goes into whatever is closest. A voice memo. A message to yourself. The back of a receipt. And then it stays there, because moving it somewhere useful is a separate chore that nobody ever does on a Tuesday.

Meanwhile the AI you talk to every day knows none of it. You are still explaining the same context, from scratch, to an assistant that would have known it if only there had been somewhere to put it.

One place, reachable from where you actually are

This is what the app is for. Not to be a better editor than your laptop. To close the ten second gap.

You open Hjarni, tap New, write the thing, and it is in your knowledge base. Not in a mobile inbox that syncs later. Not in a phone-only copy. In the same place your assistant already searches.

That is the part worth being precise about, because it is the whole point. There is no mobile database. Each app is a native shell around the same Hjarni, which means one set of notes, one set of folders, one set of tags, one MCP server. Write on the phone at 9am, and when you open Claude or ChatGPT at 2pm and ask about it, it is there. Ask your assistant to clean up and file that scrappy note, and the tidy version is on your phone by the time you next look.

Write once. You both remember.

What is actually in the app

Five tabs along the bottom, identical on both platforms:

• Dashboard. Recent notes, your favorites, and your folders.
• Inbox. Everything you captured without deciding where it goes. Triage later, from anywhere.
• New. The reason to install this. Straight to a blank note.
• Search. Your whole knowledge base, from a queue at the airport.
• Settings. Your account.

Neither app is the junior version of the other. They read the same path configuration from the same server, so what you see in one is what the other is showing.

On iPhone and iPad, photos and files attach from the phone too, camera or library. Photograph a whiteboard before someone wipes it, a label, a page of a book, a parking sign in a city you will come back to. Hjarni hands your assistant the file and the description you gave it. What the model does with it from there depends on the client you use, so give a photo a line of description and the note stays useful either way.

The capture-then-refine loop

The habit this makes possible is worth spelling out, because it is not obvious until you have done it twice.

Capture badly, on purpose. On a phone, in the moment, you are not going to write a well-structured note, and trying to is exactly why most capture habits die. So do not try. Get the fact down, ugly, half a sentence, no folder, straight into the Inbox.

Then let your assistant do the part that requires a desk. Later, from your laptop, ask it to read your Inbox, expand the shorthand into something you will understand in a year, file it in the right folder, tag it, and link it to what it relates to. It writes back into the same notes. You review the result on your phone if you want to.

That split is what makes it stick. The phone does the ten seconds that only you can do. The assistant does the twenty minutes that you never do. Neither half works alone, which is why note apps full of unread captures are so common, and why an assistant with no long-term memory keeps asking you things you have already answered.

What it does not do

Launch posts usually list only the wins, so here are the limits, plainly.

It is not a full desktop editor on a small screen, and it is not trying to be. Long writing, restructuring folders, and heavy editing are still nicer at a keyboard.

It needs a connection. Because the app reads and writes your live knowledge base rather than a local copy, there is no offline capture. On a plane, use your phone's notes app and paste it in later.

Photo capture runs out faster than note capture. The Free plan holds 20 MB across five personal files, which is a handful of photographs, not a year of them. Notes themselves are far lighter, so this bites the whiteboard habit long before it bites the writing habit.

There are no purchases in either app, and no upgrade path inside them. Plans and billing live on the website, deliberately. Everything the apps do, they do on whatever plan you are already on.

Get it

Hjarni on the App Store, for iPhone and iPad running iOS 16 or later. Hjarni on Google Play, for Android 9.0 or later. Free on both. Sign in with the account you already have and your notes are there.

If you do not have an account yet, this is a reasonable moment to start one. Hjarni is free to start, with no credit card required, and affordable if you outgrow the free plan. Write a few notes about how you work and what you are working on, connect Claude or ChatGPT once, and then keep your phone in your pocket knowing that the next thing you figure out has somewhere to go.

Create a free account, then connect your AI. The next idea you have on a walk does not have to be lost.