Iskra

Iskra is a small animated cat-girl who lives on your phone's screen. Tap her to talk, drag her anywhere, or just let her wander, nap and peek out from behind the edges. She sets alarms and reminders, keeps notes, tells the weather and — if you want — chats with you through an AI model. Free, no ads, no accounts, your data stays on your phone.

What she can do

• A young digital life: she was born the day you met, knows how many days she has lived and grows — at first everything is new to her, later she is close and sure of herself. A week, a month, a hundred days, a year are her little holidays. At night she writes the day she lived in her own diary, in her own words — you can read it in “Memory”.
• Right away, offline: alarms and timers (“set a timer for 10 minutes”), reminders that survive a restart (“remind me tomorrow at 9 to call mom”), notes (“note: buy milk”), exact sums (“what's 15% of 2300”), units (“5 miles to km”), dates (“how many days until New Year”), coins and dice, small talk, the flashlight, volume, apps, settings, and “Surprise me” — tiny games with the world around you. Online without any account: weather and exchange rates.
• A brain on the phone: download a small model once (Gemma 3 1B, or Google's new Gemma 4 E2B / E4B made for phones; 0.7–4.6 GB, chosen for your phone) and talk with no internet at all — nothing you say leaves the phone. It also steps in when the cloud is unreachable. Gemma 4 there also does what you ask in your own words: timers, alarms, reminders, notes, the flashlight, apps (and the weather when online). Or load your own GGUF file — Gemma, Qwen, Llama 3, Mistral and Phi families are written to the way they were trained.
• A real conversation: connect a free brain with one tap (OpenRouter — sign in with Google or e-mail, nothing to copy; a busy free model quietly hands over to another) or use your own key from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic Claude or any OpenAI-compatible server. The cloud brain checks facts on Wikipedia, counts with a real calculator, remembers what matters about you (and forgets what you ask her to), prepares calendar events, routes, music and messages.
• Voice: natural cloud voices (Yandex SpeechKit, ElevenLabs, OpenAI) or the free system voice; say “Iskra” or “Spark” and she listens — recognized fully on the phone.
• From any app: share text to Iskra or select it and tap “Ask Iskra” — explain, summarize, translate, save as a note or a reminder. A Quick Settings tile and launcher shortcuts (Ask, Voice, Reminder, On screen).
• A free model, your rules: by default the model answers freely — Iskra doesn't replace its answers or add prohibitions to its instructions. Settings → “Model freedom” has rules you can turn on: help in a crisis (helplines at once for “I don't want to live”: 112, Russia's 8-800-2000-122, 988 in the US, Samaritans 116 123; numbers open the dialer with a tap), “says she is a program when asked directly”, “no guilt trips”, “suggests a professional on health, law and money”. Write your own instructions to the model there too (“call me captain, answer in one sentence”) — they come before her usual manner. Confirmation of actions on the phone and protection from commands hidden in notes always stay.
• For every phone and person: English and Russian (follows the phone), Android 8 to 16, tablets and foldables, guides for Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei, Honor, OPPO, OnePlus, vivo, Tecno and others, TalkBack, large fonts, light and dark themes, calm motion, battery modes and daily cloud spending limits.

Install

1. On your phone, open Iskra.apk (always the newest version).
2. Open the downloaded file. If Android asks, allow installing apps from your browser.
3. Iskra introduces herself in four short steps; every permission is optional.

Prefer automatic updates? Add the repository in Obtainium. Copies installed from here also show a small “new version” notice (you can turn it off in Settings → About).

Each release has a .sha256 checksum next to the APK, and every APK is signed with the same key, so updates install over the previous version without losing memory or settings.

Privacy

Memory, notes, the chat and settings are stored only on your phone; keys are encrypted with the Android Keystore. Something leaves the phone only when you use a feature that needs it — the cloud model you chose, the cloud voice (reply text only), the weather (the city only), Wikipedia (the search words only), exchange rates (the currency code) — see the full table in PRIVACY.md. The brain on the phone sends nothing anywhere. Listening for her name works offline; audio never leaves the phone. No ads, no analytics, no trackers.

Questions

• Is it free? Yes. Commands, memory, notes, reminders and weather need nothing. The free OpenRouter brain gives about 50 messages a day; paid services cost fractions of a cent per reply, and you can set daily limits.
• Is it safe to install an APK? The code is open, every build is made by GitHub Actions from this repository, and the APK is signed with the project's own key. Android protects such apps with “restricted settings”; the app explains it.
• She disappears after a while. Some phones close background apps. The «Permissions» tab shows exactly what to switch on for your phone's maker.
• Is she a person? No — Iskra is an AI program. Without a brain she says so herself; with one, the answer is the model's, unless you turn on “says she is a program” in Settings → “Model freedom”.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗