Beep for iPhone.
Not yet — and here's why.

We'd rather tell you exactly what an iPhone version could and couldn't do than put up a countdown and a pre-order button. iOS is a genuinely different machine, and pretending otherwise would just disappoint you later.

Tell us you want it No signup, no list — it just opens an email

Why it can't work the same way

On Windows, Beep does two things that iOS simply does not permit any app to do.

No system-wide hotkey

An iPhone app cannot sit in the background watching for a key or gesture while you're in another app. There is no tray, no background input monitoring, and no equivalent of holding Ctrl + Win.

No typing into other apps

iOS sandboxes every app from every other app. Nothing can insert text into Mail or WhatsApp from the outside the way Beep does on Windows.

And keyboards can't hear you

Custom keyboards are the only thing allowed to type into other apps — but Apple's own documentation says they "have no access to the device microphone, so dictation input is not possible." So the obvious workaround, a keyboard with a mic button, is not buildable.

What it would actually be

Because a keyboard can type but can't listen, and an app can listen but can't type into other apps, an iPhone version has to be both — and you'd feel the seam between them. Realistically:

Capture somewhere Apple allows a mic.
The Action Button, Control Centre, or Back Tap — which means leaving the app you were typing in.
Come back.
Return to your message or email. This round trip is the part that doesn't exist on Windows, and no amount of polish removes it.
Insert with the Beep keyboard.
Switch to it with the globe key and drop the text in. The keyboard's only job is inserting — it never hears you.

We're not convinced that's worth selling

iPhone already has a microphone key on the stock keyboard: free, on-device, zero setup, and one tap closer than anything we could ship. Until we can beat that rather than approximate it, building this would be taking your money for a worse version of something you already have.

The honest open questions

Which speech engine it would use

Probably not the same one. Apple's on-device speech recognition is built into recent iPhones and is a better fit on that hardware than shipping our own — still private, still on your device, but not the identical engine the Windows version uses. One caveat we'd have to be straight about: Apple's language models are system assets the phone can remove when storage runs low, so "nothing is ever downloaded" wouldn't be true on iPhone the way it is on Windows. "Your audio never leaves your device" would still be true, and that's the part that matters.

How it would be sold

Apple requires apps to sell digital goods through the App Store, which means the Windows licensing — one payment, your key, works forever, works if we vanish — cannot carry over as-is. Working out a version of that we're still happy with is part of why this isn't built yet.

Whether a Mac version comes first

Quite possibly. A Mac can do the real thing — a global hotkey and typing into any app — the way Windows does. If you'd use Beep on a Mac, say so in the same email; it genuinely affects what we build next.

What about Android?

Fairer question, and the answer is different — but it lands in the same place.

Technically, yes

Android would let us run the same on-device engine, at full size, with the same privacy promise. Unlike iOS, none of that is blocked.

But only as a keyboard

Android has no equivalent of holding a key anywhere. Text can only be inserted while Beep is your active keyboard — so we'd have to ship a whole QWERTY keyboard you adopt as your default, and you'd switch to it for every dictation.

Against free incumbents

Gboard ships on the phone with offline voice typing, and free open-source dictation keyboards already exist. Charging for a weaker version of our own idea isn't a product we'd be proud of.

The pattern on both

On a phone, the thing that makes Beep worth paying for — it's always there, you never switch to it — is exactly the thing that doesn't survive. If that ever changes, or if enough of you tell us the keyboard trade is worth it anyway, we'll revisit. Until then we'd rather build the Mac version, where the real thing is possible.

In the meantime

The Windows version is finished and doing the full job today — hold a key anywhere, speak, and your words land at the cursor, entirely offline.

See Beep for Windows One-time · Windows 10/11 64-bit