Role
Founder and sole developer
Organization
Lux Softworks
Timeline
2025 – present
Visit lumen-browser.app
The Lumen website hero, reading Read the web. Keep the good parts. Ask anything later.

Problem

A browser remembers which pages you opened, but not what you learned on them.

Lumen started from a problem I knew all too well. I read something useful online and, a few days later, I completely forgot where it was. A browser's history is little help, since it only helps with searching the words in a page's title or address. As a result, a quick search for an idea finds nothing (unless the reader remembers the exact wording). Cloud AI assistants are actually able to answer questions about a specific page, but the computational process is run on the company's servers. For a large record of everything a person reads, that simple trade asks for a grand amount of trust.

feel they have little or no control over the data companies collect about them
73%
understand little to nothing about what companies do with their data
67%
A survey of 5,101 U.S. adults, May 2023. Source: Pew Research Center, 2023

Lumen avoids the question entirely. Nothing it records about your reading patterns or content is ever sent to a server. There is no company holding your data to begin with.

Solution

Remember what you read and learn from it, all locally

Lumen reads with you as you browse, looking for signs that you're interested in and attentively reading a page. Once a page passes that check, Lumen pulls out the article's text, summarizes it, and classifies it under a topic and a website. Each topic and website have a summary of its own. Asking a question searches that library with two different methods: Lumen searches the words in the article and meaning by using Apple's on-device language tools. The highest matching pages then go to Llama 3.2 1B, which runs on the phone through MLX Swift and answers questions directly from the readers database. Each source is cited. After a one-time download of the model (about 700 MB), Lumen works entirely offline. It needs no account and no server. Finally, Lumen blocks trackers and third-party cookies by default.

Highlights

  • Llama 3.2 1B on device through MLX Swift
  • Open source under AGPL-3.0
  • Live on the App Store since April 2026, 480+ downloads

Stack

Language
  • Swift
Apple frameworks
  • SwiftUI
  • UIKit
  • WebKit
  • NaturalLanguage
  • CryptoKit
  • PDFKit
On-device AI
  • MLX Swift
  • Llama 3.2 1B
  • swift-transformers
  • swift-jinja
Storage and parsing
  • SQLite
  • SwiftSoup
  • swift-readability
Tools
  • Xcode
  • Next.js
NextStedo