Engra

Engra is a private knowledge app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that helps you capture what matters, find it later, and ask questions across your own notes and sources. Notes, documents, web snippets, screenshots, semantic search, and source-cited answers come together in one Apple-native experience built around a single idea: your knowledge should stay yours.

That idea is structural, not cosmetic. AI runs on-device with Apple's Foundation Models, sync happens through your personal iCloud, and no Engra server ever collects, indexes, or analyzes what you save.

Project at a Glance

The Challenge

You capture information everywhere: notes apps, screenshots, saved articles, copied links, PDFs, web snippets, messages to yourself, and half-formed thoughts scattered across devices. The problem was never a shortage of places to write things down. It's that those fragments rarely become useful again.

Traditional note apps preserve information but lean on exact-match search, folders, tags, and manual filing. AI-powered knowledge tools can synthesize and retrieve, but most require sending your notes, documents, and questions to a third-party server. For a personal second brain, that tradeoff felt wrong.

So Engra started from a single question: what would a personal knowledge base feel like if it were as native as Apple Notes, as searchable as a semantic database, and as private as a local file?

The Approach

Four commitments shaped the product:

1. Capture is instant. Saving a thought, screenshot, source, or document takes seconds, not a filing session.
2. Search understands meaning. You can find the idea you remember even when you've forgotten the exact words.
3. AI cites its work. Every answer links back to the notes and sources it drew from.
4. Privacy is architectural — your knowledge lives on your devices and in your private iCloud, never on an application server.

The result treats notes as more than text. Every saved item joins a connected knowledge base you can search, revisit, and question later.

What We Built

Private Knowledge Library

Engra's core is a unified library for everything you want to remember: notes, documents, web snippets, screenshots, and saved sources. Rather than forcing everything into a rigid folder tree, it organizes knowledge around capture, retrieval, and connection.

Save a quick thought, keep an article excerpt, store a screenshot or a PDF — each lands in the same searchable base. That makes Engra equally useful for research, product thinking, writing, learning, and everyday reference.

Source-Cited Answers

Ask Engra about your own library in plain language. Instead of generic AI output, it answers from your saved notes and cites the exact sources behind each response.

That matters for trust. A second brain shouldn't guess. It should help you rediscover what you captured, see where an answer came from, and jump straight back into the original context.

Meaning-Aware Search

Keyword search fails the moment you remember the idea but not the phrasing. Engra's search reaches for meaning, surfacing related thoughts even when your query doesn't match the original words.

Search for "pricing strategy" and Engra will surface the note where you wrote "monetization model" or "subscription tiers." It finds the underlying idea, not just a literal string.

Connected Notes and Sources

Ideas rarely stand alone. While you read, Engra surfaces related notes and sources, letting one thought lead naturally to the next — turning a passive archive into an active thinking environment.

There are no graph views to wrangle or organization systems to maintain. Useful connections simply appear at the moment they're relevant.

Fast Capture

A second brain only earns its keep if capture becomes a habit. Engra makes saving frictionless from anywhere, so a thought is preserved before it slips away.

Capture stays deliberately light: write it down, save the source, add the screenshot, move on. Organization can wait, because retrieval and connection happen after the fact.

Private by Design

Privacy here isn't a feature bolted on at the end; it's the foundation everything else sits on. Engra requires no account, runs no analytics, sells no data, and leans on no third-party AI service. Apple's Foundation Models handle AI on-device. CloudKit syncs through your own iCloud. Search indexes stay local. There's no Engra server holding your notes.

Technical Highlights

Architecture

Engra is an Apple-native application for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. SwiftUI drives the interface, SwiftData handles local persistence, CloudKit manages private iCloud sync, and Apple's Foundation Models power on-device AI.

Key technical decisions

• On-device AI — AI features run on Apple Foundation Models, so private notes never reach an external provider.
• CloudKit private sync — data syncs through your personal iCloud account rather than an Engra-hosted backend.
• Local-first knowledge base — notes, sources, indexes, and retrieval all run against fast local storage.
• Source-grounded answers — every AI response ties back to the notes and documents used as context.
• Apple-native UI — the interface stays fast and familiar across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• No account system — no custom auth layer, no user database, no third-party tracking dependency.

Outcome

Engra gives Apple users a private place to keep what matters and actually find it again. It pairs the simplicity of a notes app with the retrieval power of semantic search and the reliability of source-cited AI.

You don't trade privacy for intelligence. Notes stay on device. Sync stays in private iCloud. AI runs locally. You stay in control.

Keep What Matters. Privately.

Engra is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Visit engra.stewmore.dev