Everything LocalDocs Can Do With Your Documents
""Ask a folder of your own files anything - private, offline, and entirely on your phone.""
You already have the answer. It is in a PDF you saved eleven months ago, or a lease you scanned before you moved, or a manual you downloaded the week the boiler was installed. The information is not missing. It is just buried somewhere in a folder you have stopped being able to search by memory, and finding it means opening files one at a time until something looks familiar.
Private, on-device AI for your documents — ask questions, get cited answers.
LocalDocs replaces that whole ritual with a question. Point it at a folder of your own documents and ask in plain language - what does the warranty say about water damage, when does the notice period start, which of these papers mentions the second dosage. It reads across everything in the folder at once and answers, then shows you the exact document it drew from so you can tap straight through to the page.
The whole thing runs on your phone. No account to create, no upload step, no internet connection needed once you are set up. Your documents stay where they already are, and the assistant comes to them. It is on Google Play for Android, and this is a complete tour of what it does.
One App, Every Document You Own
There is a difference between search and asking, and it is the difference between finding a document and finding an answer. Search hands you six files that contain the word deposit and leaves the reading to you. Asking gets you the sentence you needed, from the document that actually said it. LocalDocs is built for the second one, and that changes what a folder is for - a pile of files you maintain becomes something closer to a colleague who has read all of them. LocalDocs is built around five things that work best together. Ask a whole folder at once, rather than hunting through documents one by one. Get answers with tappable sources, so a reply names the document behind it and one tap shows you the exact page, with the original a tap further on. Bring the formats you actually have - PDF, Word, plain text, Markdown and HTML, plus photographs and hand-drawn sketches - attach a photo of a notebook page, a whiteboard or a diagram to your question and the model looks at the image itself. Work entirely on-device, with no accounts, no analytics and no tracking. And do something with the answer once you have it: copy it, share it, or have it read aloud while your hands are busy, with everything organised into folders the app treats as separate mini libraries.
Three screens, no ceremony. The whole app is a library, a chat, and a settings screen. The library answers what can I ask about - your folders, each document with its page count and a status chip while it indexes. Tap in and you are in the chat, which answers ask it. There is no tab bar to learn and no account to create; first launch walks you through a short tour you can skip, and after that it is straight to the question box.
The controls that make the chat yours. Under the question box sits a row of four buttons, and they are where LocalDocs stops being a search box and starts being a tool you drive.
Add attaches whatever the question needs - a voice question, a document, a photo, a camera shot, or a drawing you sketch on the spot.
Effort is a slider from Faster to Smarter, and it decides how hard the app works before it answers. Fastest gives you the quickest answers with rougher document matching. Fast keeps full document matching but stays quick. Quality, the default, is balanced - it takes extra care only when a question actually needs it. Thorough is the most careful setting, fully re-interpreting every follow-up before it searches. On a quick lookup you want Fastest. On a tangled contract question you want Thorough. Most of the time you leave it alone.
Rewrite answer fixes the answer you already have instead of making you re-type the question. Simpler plains it out. Bullet points restructures it into a list. Detailed goes further and genuinely returns to your documents for a fuller answer, rather than just padding the words already on screen.
Actions is a set of one-tap questions for the things everybody asks anyway: Summary for the key points briefly, Key numbers for amounts and figures, Dates and deadlines with what each one is for, and Action items for the things somebody actually has to do. Point them at a contract, a project pack or a folder of meeting notes and you get the four most useful reads of a document without composing a single question. The same panel holds Clear chat memory, for when you want a clean slate.
Two more features quietly make it stick. Share a web page or link into LocalDocs from any other app and it pulls that page in and indexes it beside your files, so the manufacturer spec sheet, the reference article and the recipe all live in the same place as your PDFs instead of in a browser tab you will lose by Thursday. And every question you ask is kept in a history grouped into Today, Yesterday, This Week and Older, so the thing you worked out three weeks ago is still there, exactly as you asked it.
And because the model lives on the phone, the app does not go quiet when the signal does. According to the app's own privacy policy, LocalDocs has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising SDKs and no crash-reporting services, and your content sits in the app's private storage, which Android encrypts at rest on devices with a lock screen enabled. A basement, a plant room, a plane, a train through a tunnel - it works the same in all of them.
That privacy is a practical feature as much as a principle. It means there is nothing to sign up for and no password to forget. It means the documents you would hesitate to upload anywhere - the medical letter, the legal correspondence, the diary, the commercially sensitive drawing - are exactly the ones this handles most comfortably, because nothing about them leaves the device unless you choose to send it - there is no background upload. And it means the app is equally usable on a client site with no signal as it is at your kitchen table.
Where people put it to work, straight out of the box:
- Studying and revision. Lecture slides, textbook chapters and your typed notes answer questions together in one library, and you can attach a photo of a handwritten page whenever a question is about that page - much closer to how revision actually works than opening six files in sequence.
- Contracts, policies and paperwork. Leases, insurance documents, warranties and bills stop being a shoebox. Ask what a clause says and get pointed straight at the page it is on.
- Manuals and field reference. Equipment manuals, standards documents and installation guides are long and badly indexed, and they are needed in exactly the places with the worst connectivity. Offline is not a nice-to-have there, it is the whole point.
- Research papers and reports. That folder of PDFs on one topic becomes something you can interrogate across, instead of a reading list you feel guilty about.
- Travel, journals and personal records. Boarding passes, hotel confirmations, itineraries, diaries and appointment notes - the material you would rather not hand to anybody else, which is exactly what an on-device app is for.
- Hobbies and the household. Board game rulebooks mid-argument, recipes, plant care guides, instrument manuals. Low stakes, high frequency, and nobody was ever going to build a filing system for them.
Citations you can actually open. Most tools that claim to cite their sources give you a file name and leave the rest to you. LocalDocs goes the whole way. Numbered markers appear inline in the answer, and a single sources button sits underneath it. Tap it and the Answer sources sheet opens on the exact page that produced the claim - rendered on the device, with the cited passage highlighted on the page itself, and a picker for stepping between the other sources.
From there you can page back and forth through the document, zoom in, open the original at that page in another app, or share the source; text, Markdown and HTML sources show the cited passage directly instead of a page image. When a passage cannot be pinpointed exactly, it says so and shows you the cited page anyway rather than pretending to a precision it does not have. Checking an answer against the paperwork is a couple of taps, which is the difference between an assistant you trust with a lease and one you only use for trivia.
Download LocalDocs. It is on Google Play: get LocalDocs for Android. It is listed under Productivity and runs on Android 12 and later on 64-bit devices. The on-device AI models download once on first run and come to roughly 4 GB, so do that first run on wifi with the storage free, and setup takes care of itself. You can see the full listing and screenshots on the Mystum app directory page.
LocalDocs is Mystum's own app - we built it, and this article is us telling you about it directly.
Start With One Folder
The fastest way to see whether this belongs on your phone is to pick the folder that annoys you most and point the app at it. For most people that is the paperwork folder - the one with the lease, the insurance documents, the warranty PDFs and the three years of bills nobody has opened since they were filed. Ask it something you genuinely wanted to know last month and could not be bothered to dig for. That first answer, with the source document sitting underneath it, tends to be the moment it clicks.
From there it grows the way your files do. Add the manuals. Add the study material. Photograph the notebook pages you never typed up and add those too. Share in the reference pages you keep meaning to read. Because libraries are kept separate, work material and personal paperwork never have to sit in the same pile, and each one stays fast and focused on what it holds. A student can keep one library per module. A contractor can keep one per site. A household can keep one for the boring but unavoidable folder of documents that governs a home.
The pitch is simple enough to state in a sentence. Everything you have already saved becomes something you can ask, the answers come back with receipts attached, and none of it needs an account or a connection to work. LocalDocs is on Google Play for Android 12 and later.
Private, on-device AI for your documents — ask questions, get cited answers.