Found: Private Library

A private home for everything you reuse: snippets, documents, files and images. Save from any app in one move. Get it back in seconds from search, Spotlight, Siri, Shortcuts or your keyboard.

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Inspiration

Found started as a notes app, and that description broke down quickly. What I actually kept coming back for were small things: a canned reply, a PDF someone asked for, a passport scan, a Wi-Fi password, a photo of a whiteboard. They were scattered across notes, downloads, chats, photos and email. The files existed, but finding the right one had become a memory test.

So I asked a simpler question: what do people repeatedly need, but repeatedly struggle to retrieve? Found is my answer.

What it does

Found is a private library for things worth finding again: notes, links, photos, PDFs and other files.

  • Save in one move from any app through the share sheet.
  • Find it in seconds. Search reaches text inside PDFs and photos and opens the exact page. Optional search by meaning helps when you remember only the idea.
  • Use it where you are. Share a question to Find with Found, type a ;shortcut with Found Keyboard, or start from Spotlight, Siri and Shortcuts, without leaving what you are doing.
  • Yours. No account, no server. Your library stays on your device.

Found is free. First Edition is an optional one-time purchase through RevenueCat, for people who want to support it early.

How I built it

React Native and Expo in TypeScript, SQLite on the device, and native Swift for App Intents, Core Spotlight, the keyboard and share extensions, Vision and PDFKit for text in photos and PDFs, and Foundation Models for on-device intelligence.

Challenges

  • The assistant I did not ship. My first version was an on-device AI assistant built on Gemma models. On a laptop it felt remarkable. On phones it needed gigabytes of storage, downloads failed on real networks, and lower-end devices struggled. The effort was growing faster than the value, so I moved it out of the core product and kept search by meaning, which solves the real problem at a fraction of the cost.
  • Siri and Shortcuts worked in my own builds but not on TestFlight. Found disappeared from the Shortcuts app and Siri said "something went wrong". The device logs showed that archiving had stripped the symbol that tells iOS where Found's intents are described, so iOS could not index them. Letting Xcode merge that metadata itself fixed it. The lesson: read the failing build's own logs instead of guessing.

What I learned

This is my first iOS app. I learned how an app is built and shipped end to end, from extensions and App Intents to in-app purchases and the App Store. I also learned what on-device intelligence has to earn before it belongs in a product: it must be fast, work on the phones people own, and clearly beat a simpler interaction.

What's next

Found 1.1, now live on App Store, adds iPad, Siri phrases, reminders on anything and What's inside. After that, iCloud sync and a Mac app, if real use says they deserve to exist.

The name is the standard I want Found to meet. Something was worth keeping. Later, at the moment it matters, it is found.

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