Press kit

In one paragraph #

Fihris is a research workspace for iPhone and iPad. You find papers across the major scholarly sources, read and annotate them with Apple Pencil or a fingertip, ask questions about a whole collection and get answers that point at the exact paper and page they came from, and write the manuscript in LaTeX citing the same library. It replaces the usual stack of a reference manager, a PDF annotator and an online LaTeX editor with one app, and adds a grounded AI layer that none of them has, without ever putting your papers on somebody else's server.

In one line #

Fihris: read, ask and cite your papers, on iPhone and iPad.

Facts #

What it does #

• Discover: one search across nine free sources: arXiv, Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, Europe PMC, dblp, ERIC and INSPIRE-HEP. Results are deduplicated; Unpaywall can find a legal open-access PDF for a result, downloaded straight to your device. Springer Nature joins search only if you add your own key.
• Read: a PDF reader with highlights, underlines, strikethrough, Apple Pencil ink, a reflowed reading mode for small screens, OCR for scanned papers, and notes linked to the exact span they came from.
• Ask: questions about one paper or a whole collection, answered from passages retrieved out of your own library, with a citation chip on every claim that opens the paper at that page with the passage highlighted.
• Mind maps and analysis: a hand-editable map of your own ideas, and a factual view of who cites whom among papers you choose.
• Write: a LaTeX editor with a cite picker over your library, bibliography export in BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON, and a one-tap hand-off to Overleaf.

The four routes an answer can take #

Fihris always uses the smallest route that fits, and shows you which before it sends anything.

1. On this device, with Apple Intelligence: Apple's on-device model, on devices that support Apple Intelligence. Nothing leaves the device. Free, works offline.
2. Apple's private cloud: Apple's Private Cloud Compute, inside Apple's privacy boundary, where the device supports it. Free.
3. Fihris Intelligence: a relay we operate that stores no question, passage or answer, forwarding to Anthropic's Claude. Paid, optional, and gated behind a consent card that names both the relay and Anthropic.
4. Your own Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT account: if you connect a key, straight from device to provider. Your account pays. Free to Fihris and to us.

Privacy #

• Papers never reach a server we run. Fihris's relay receives short retrieved passages, never a PDF and never a whole paper, and the relay keeps nothing: no question, passage or answer is stored there, in any environment. What it does keep is a credit ledger with no content in it, and technical metadata in Cloudflare's logs: task type, model, token counts, timing, status, again with no content. The relay's "keeps nothing" covers the relay only. Anthropic says it deletes standard API inputs and outputs within 30 days, with stated exceptions, and Fihris does not claim otherwise.
• The search index and the text embeddings are built on the device and never leave it, on any route, on any plan.
• There is no account and no sign-in. No profile, no password; an email address only if the user chooses to receive email.
• There are no analytics. No analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no crash reporter, no tracking.
• Sync is the user's own iCloud, free and on by default where iCloud is available, in a private database the developer cannot read. It can be turned off in Settings.
• Every third-party route asks first, with a card that names the processor and lists exactly what will be sent.
• An on-device log, Sent to your account, records every consented send to Fihris Intelligence or the user's own AI provider: route, paper titles, page and token counts, never content, for the user to audit.

How citations get their page #

Fihris chunks every PDF itself, so it owns the mapping from a passage to its paper, page and character range. Models are handed numbered passages and are asked to cite by number; they are never asked for, and never permitted to write, a page number. Fihris resolves the numbers to pages from its own index. A number a model invents resolves to nothing and never becomes a citation.

So the page pointer cannot be hallucinated. Only the choice of passage can be wrong, and that is one tap away from being checked.

The name #

Fihris (فهرس) is Arabic for index or catalogue. It nods to Ibn al-Nadim al-Warrāq's Kitab al-Fihrist of 987 CE, a catalogue of some 4,300 authors and arguably the first reference manager ever compiled. Please use it untranslated; it is not an acronym.

Contact #

Press and everything else: [email protected]