Offline Personal Assistant App: The Unutma Story

Unutma, my offline personal assistant app, is the first thing I ever shipped. The name is Turkish for "don't forget," and that is exactly where it came from.

A small daily anxiety

I'd leave the house and, ten minutes later, the question would arrive: did I lock the door? Did I turn off the stove? Most of the time I had. But I couldn't remember doing it, and the not-knowing followed me around all day.

So the first version of Unutma was almost embarrassingly simple. A place to tap "locked the door" as I walked out, so that later I could check and stop wondering. Quick actions, a timestamp, nothing else. I built it for myself, in the evenings, as a way to learn how apps are made.

Then my family needed a password vault

The next piece came from the older people in my family. They kept forgetting their passwords. They'd write them on paper, lose the paper, reset the password, write it down again. I didn't want to hand them yet another account to forget.

So I added an encrypted Vault inside Unutma. No account, no server. The data stays on the phone. For them, that was the whole point: one protected place that didn't need the internet to work and didn't ask them to remember a login.

It kept growing

Once the vault was there, the rest followed the same logic: if I'm already opening this app, why not keep the other small things here too? Notes. A journal. A simple budget and expense list. A shopping list. Routines. Reminders and to-dos. A calendar to see it all in one view.

I know that sounds like feature creep, and some of it was. But the common thread was always the same: these were the things I kept forgetting, and I wanted them in one quiet place that belonged to me.

Unutma Brain, an on-device assistant

The part I'm proudest of came later. After a while the app had a lot of places to put things, and choosing the right one became its own small chore. Is this a note or a to-do? A reminder or a journal entry?

So I built what I call Unutma Brain: an offline personal assistant. You say or type one sentence — "buy milk tomorrow," "I locked the door," "dentist on Friday at three" — and it files it where it belongs. You can also ask it things like "did I lock the door?" and it answers from your own data.

I want to be precise about what this is and isn't, because it would be easy to oversell:

It runs on the phone. There's a small on-device model plus a set of rules. Nothing is sent to a server.
It is not a chatbot and not a large language model. You can't chat with it or ask it to write things for you.
It doesn't always understand. When it isn't sure, it asks instead of guessing.
The assistant works in Turkish, English, German, Spanish, French and Italian.

For me the point was never "talk to an AI." It was "stop thinking about where to put things." A sentence goes in, it lands in the right list, and I move on with my day.

What I learned

Unutma taught me how to build an app. Publishing it taught me everything else: store pages, screenshots, review guidelines, what happens when you change your app's name too often, how slowly real people arrive. Most of what I know about shipping, I learned by getting it wrong here first.

It also taught me that the app I use most isn't the fanciest one. It's the one I trust with the small stuff.

Where it is now

Unutma has been on the App Store since February 2026 and I'm still developing it. The assistant is where I spend most of my time: better understanding, fewer unnecessary questions, more of the everyday sentences people actually say. If you try it and something feels off, that's exactly the kind of thing I want to hear about.