Sovereign AI in your pocket — now in the Community Edition

The RAGSuite mobile app has left Beta, and with v1.1.0 it is part of the Community Edition. iOS and Android, signing in to the instance you host, with the account your colleague already has. No licence key, no conversation with us first.

That is the announcement. The more useful half of this post is what a phone changes about self-hosted AI — because the moment answers become portable, two questions arrive that a browser on a company laptop never asked.

Why it was Enterprise, and why that stopped making sense

The app was built for the buyer who was asking for it: a compliance officer who wanted the handbook answerable from a factory floor, an operations lead away from a desk. Those conversations were Enterprise conversations, so the app sat in the Enterprise Edition, and signing in required a licence.

The longer the Community Edition ran, the stranger that looked. Someone self-hosts RAGSuite, indexes their own documents, gets citation-backed answers on their own infrastructure — and then hits a paywall for the same answers on the device they actually carry. Nothing about the mobile app is a governance feature. It is the product, on a smaller screen.

So it moves. Our own rule says additions to the Community Edition are always safe and removals never are, and this is an addition.

One codebase, which is why this was possible at all

RAGSuite is built in React Native, so the web application and the mobile app come from one codebase in one repository. That is an engineering decision with two visible consequences.

The first is that the app mirrors the server. There is no separate “mobile product” with its own subset of features and its own release schedule. Point the app at a Community instance and you get the Community Edition. Point it at an Enterprise instance and the Enterprise features appear, because they were always a property of the instance rather than of the device.

The second is that the app is open source. It sits in the same public repository under Apache 2.0 as the rest of the Community Edition, with the Enterprise parts in the separately licensed directory, exactly as on the web. You can read what the app does before you install it — which is a different kind of assurance from a privacy policy that says the same thing in prose.

What the app actually is

A client for your own instance. That sentence carries more weight than it looks.

There is no RAGSuite account. Nobody signs up with us to use the app, because there is nothing of ours to sign up to. The app asks for the address of your instance and the credentials your colleague already has, and from then on it talks to your server the way the browser does. No telemetry, no licence-server call, nothing brokered through us — the same no-phone-home property the platform has always had, which you can verify in the source rather than take on trust.

Answers keep their citations on a phone screen. That matters more on mobile than on a laptop, because a small screen is exactly where a confident, unsourced paragraph is most likely to be believed and least likely to be checked.

The two questions a phone hands your IT team

This is the part we would rather say now than have you discover in week three.

How do phones reach the instance? A self-hosted deployment is often reachable only inside the corporate network, which is a perfectly good decision — and it means a phone on a mobile network cannot see it. The ordinary answers are the ordinary ones: put the devices on the VPN, or publish a controlled endpoint with the protections you would give any external-facing service. Neither is exotic. But it is a decision to make deliberately before the first person asks why the app cannot connect from a train, and it is a decision only you can make, because we are not in the path.

What does a lost phone mean? Less than it might, and not nothing. The app is useless without your instance and the user’s credentials, so a found phone is not a copy of your knowledge base. Biometric unlock sits on top. What you still want is the boring hygiene any mobile deployment needs: device management, the ability to end a session centrally — the Enterprise Edition’s session controls and audit trail are the difference here — and a clear answer for who to tell when a device goes missing.

Neither question is created by RAGSuite. They are what happens when useful answers become portable, and they are worth writing down before the rollout rather than after.

What this does not mean

It does not mean RAGSuite is now inside Teams or Slack as an app; that is a separate thing and we have not built it. It does not mean the app works without a RAGSuite instance somewhere — there is no hosted version to fall back on. And it does not, yet, mean you can search for it in the app stores: the listings are being prepared, and we would rather say that plainly than let a badge imply otherwise. When they are live, the mobile page will link them.

What it does mean is that the open, self-hosted, inspectable edition now reaches the device your colleagues actually carry. For a category whose entire argument is that you should not have to hand your knowledge to someone else’s infrastructure to get a useful answer from it, that was an odd gap to leave open.

Frequently asked questions

← All posts