Raycast on the Mac is a powerful keyboard-based launcher. It’s quite popular in Mac productivity circles, and you can think of it as a customizable version of Spotlight. You can add extensions to it, use it for math, create custom shortcuts with it, search for files, and now, of course, talk to AI, using a floating window on top of anything on your Mac.
Apple users have requested an iPhone version of Raycast for a long time. But things that Raycast can do on the Mac, like access the clipboard, trigger extensions, and manage windows and files, just aren’t possible on the iPhone and iPad. But Raycast for iPhone is finally here after all, and it’s just the beginning.
Raycast AI on iPhone
Credit: Raycast
Recently, Raycast has become kind of an all-in-one AI tool, providing you with access to the latest and greatest models from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Deepseek, and more at one low monthly price. You get 50 messages for free, and the $10/month Raycast Pro plan provides you with access to smaller models like GPT mini and Claude 3.5 Haiku. The $20/month plan opens that up to the models like Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and more.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Raycast on the iPhone carries the same design language as the Raycast app on the Mac. When you open the Raycast app on iPhone, you’ll see a text box at the bottom, and a Voice button. On the top of the page, there are shortcuts to view all your AI conversations, Notes, Snippets, and Quicklinks. The middle part can be customized to add any AI or Raycast action shortcut that you wish.
By default, you’ll talk to Raycast AI using the app’s own Ray model, which is based on GPT-4. But you can tap on the Model button to switch to any available model, including any custom AI models that you might have built on Mac. You can also add attachments, ask follow up questions, and more.
Notes, Quicklinks and Snippets
Credit: Raycast
When it comes to productivity, the Raycast iPhone app brings over three Mac features: Notes, Quicklinks, and Snippets. If you’re paying for the $10/month Raycast Pro subscription, you’ll see that all your notes, Quicklinks and Snippets from your Mac will show up automatically on the iPhone (using the Cloud Sync feature).
But even if you aren’t, you can still use these features for free on the iPhone; they just won’t sync to your Mac. You can create 5 notes for free using Raycast Notes.
You’ll also be able to export notes in HTML, Markdown and in rich text.
What do you think so far?
Quicklinks and Snippets are let you do a bit more, though. Quicklinks let you create shortcuts for launching any URL with a tap. This URL can take you directly to a part of an app, or website.
Snippets is Raycast’s version of a text expansion tool, and is a more robust version of the built-in Text Replacement tool on iPhone and Mac. Here, you can create text-based shortcuts that expand into any saved text, like your address, or a work email template, easily.
A ways to go
And that’s all there is so far. Currently, Raycast thinks of the iPhone app mostly as a companion to the more powerful Raycast utility on the Mac. According to an interview with Raycast co-founder Petr Nikolaev (via The Verge) the goal for the Raycast app was to put something in front of Raycast users and see how they respond. The developers plan to build on top of this foundation using the feedback from users. If the Raycast app on iPhone is successful, they also plan to build an Android app (a the Windows app is already in the works).
Currently, Raycast supports the Shortcuts framework that makes it easy to open the 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 love to bring extensions support to the iPhone app, but Apple’s sandboxed environment won’t allow for it. Although, they are excited about a potential custom keyboard implementation that would let them bring some of the Raycast features into other apps using the system keyboard.
