Muesli
Granola cancelled my university Pro subscription, so I built my own.
- Role
- Designed & built solo
- Timeline
- 1 week
- Team
- Solo (design & engineering)
- Skills
- Product Design
- iOS Development
- LLM Integration
- System Architecture
Built for myself and in daily use: every meeting note I take runs through it. App Store release pending.
The Problem
Granola is genuinely good. Then the free student plan ended and I was looking at a subscription for something that also sends every word of my meetings off to someone else's servers. Meeting notes are about the most sensitive text I've got. Salaries, plans, half-baked ideas, other people's names. Paying to hand all of that over just to get a tidy summary never sat right with me. So I wanted the Granola thing, hit record and come back to proper notes, but with two rules. It runs on my phone, and the notes are mine as plain Markdown I can drop into Obsidian.
Overview
Muesli records a meeting and transcribes it live with Apple's on-device speech recogniser. It tidies up the messy dictation, then Apple's on-device Foundation Models write it into a proper note with a title, a summary, the decisions and the action items. Every note saves as a Markdown file you can open straight in Obsidian. No account, no server, no tracking.
Personal Goals
- 01
Prove the on-device stack is enough
No cloud model. I wanted to see how far Apple's Foundation Models and Speech frameworks get you on something you'd actually use every day.
- 02
Make privacy the default
Local files, no account, and notes as Markdown you own and can take anywhere.
- 03
Make it feel native
Liquid Glass, a proper type system, a Metal shader for voice mode. It should feel like it belongs on iOS 26, not a web app in a wrapper.
01 / 04
Record → structured notes
Hit record and talk. Your words show up live as you go. When you stop, Muesli cleans up the transcript and Foundation Models write it into a titled note with the summary, decisions and action items, all in the background.
02 / 04
Ask your notes
Every note has an ask bar. Ask something about that meeting, like what did I agree to own, and the on-device model answers from the note and streams it straight in.
03 / 04
Chat across every meeting
The main chat reads across all your notes. Ask what your open action items are this week and it pulls them together from separate meetings, still on the phone.
04 / 04
Talk to your notes
A hands-free voice mode. Ask out loud, hear it back. The background is a live Metal shader that bends your words around as you speak.
The icon
The bowl is an original commission. My dad, Guy Parker-Rees, illustrates children’s books for a living, and he drew this one for a fee of exactly nothing. In fairness, I built his website.
Under the hood
Five steps. Only 03 ever crosses the line. Tap a step.
on-device
then, same on-device model:
network
One tap to record. Mic only — nothing is uploaded.
One tap to record. Mic only — nothing is uploaded.
Conclusion
Muesli answers a question I actually had. Can a properly private, on-device meeting assistant feel as good as the cloud one it's replacing? On iOS 26, with Foundation Models doing the thinking and Apple Speech doing the listening, it can. And the notes come out as plain Markdown I get to keep forever. Next up: have it offer to record the moment a calendar meeting starts, and store notes in an encrypted Cryptomator vault so they live in my own cloud.