Raycast Finally Has an IPhone App, but It’s Quite Limited
Raycast on Mac is a powerful keyboard launcher . It’s quite popular in Mac user circles , and you can think of it as a customized version of Spotlight. You can add extensions to it, use it for math calculations, create your own shortcuts with it , search for files, and now, of course, talk to AI using a floating window on top of everything on your Mac.
Apple users have been asking for an iPhone version of Raycast for a long time. But what Raycast can do on a Mac, like access the clipboard, launch extensions, and manage windows and files, is simply not possible on iPhone and iPad. But Raycast for iPhone is finally here , and this is just the beginning.
Raycast AI on iPhone
Lately, Raycast has become something of an all-in-one AI tool, giving you access to the latest and greatest models from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Deepseek, and more for one low monthly price. You get 50 messages for free, and the $10 per month Raycast Pro plan gives you access to smaller models like the GPT mini and Claude 3.5 Haiku. The $20 per month plan gives access to models such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and more.
Raycast on iPhone has the same design language as the Raycast app on Mac. When you open the Raycast app on iPhone, you will see a text box at the bottom and a Voice button. At the top of the page are shortcuts to view all your AI conversations, notes, snippets, and quick links. The middle section can be customized to add any AI or Raycast action shortcut you wish.
By default, you will communicate with Raycast AI using the application’s own GPT-4 based Ray model. But you can click the Model button to switch to any available model, including any custom AI models you may have created on the Mac. You can also add attachments, ask additional questions, and more.
Notes, quick links and snippets
When it comes to productivity, the Raycast iPhone app offers three Mac features: Notes, Quick Links, and Snippets. If you pay for the $10/month Raycast Pro subscription, you’ll see that all your notes, quick links, and snippets from your Mac will automatically appear on your iPhone (using the Cloud Sync feature).
But even if that’s not the case, you can still use these features on iPhone for free; they just won’t sync with your Mac. You can create 5 notes for free using Raycast Notes.
You will also be able to export notes to HTML, Markdown and rich text.
However, quick links and snippets allow you to do a little more. Quick Links let you create shortcuts to launch any URL with one tap. This URL can take you directly to part of the application or website.
Snippets are a version of the Raycast text expansion tool and a more robust version of the built-in text replacement tool on iPhone and Mac. Here you can easily create text shortcuts that easily expand to any saved text, such as your address or work email template.
Ways to go
And that’s all there is for now. Currently, Raycast views the iPhone app primarily as a complement to the more powerful Raycast utility on the Mac. According to an interview with Raycast co-founder Peter Nikolaev (via The Verge ), the purpose of the Raycast app was to offer something to Raycast users and see how they responded. The developers plan to develop this foundation using user feedback. If the Raycast iPhone app is successful, they also plan to create an Android app ( a Windows app is already in development).
Raycast currently supports a shortcut structure that makes it easy to open AI chat and other features directly from Control Center or the lock screen. But it’s not the same as replacing Siri or Spotlight Search. According to the co-founders, they would like to provide support for extensions in the iPhone application, but Apple’s sandbox environment does not allow this. However, they are excited about the potential implementation of a custom keyboard, which will allow them to bring some of Raycast’s functionality to other applications using the system keyboard.