Ukraine-based app developer MacPaw announced in 2026 a partnership with Liquid AI to power its products with locally hosted AI models, with plans to eventually make the technology available to third-party developers building on its SetApp app store.
At the center of the collaboration is MacPaw’s AI assistant Eney, first unveiled last year. The company is now working on a locally hosted version, with Liquid AI developing an on-device inference system called Elix alongside a local memory system to support it.
Liquid AI co-founder and CEO Ramin Hasani said the approach involves selecting a hardware-specific architecture before training begins. “That allows us to really have the most efficient version of intelligence that runs directly on the device, with benefits like privacy and security,” Hasani told TechCrunch. He added that Liquid AI is also building a customization layer so models can improve over time using user data.
MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan said locally hosted models will allow users to run assistants and agentic workflows offline. Once the local processing architecture is finalized, MacPaw plans to open the stack to developers, and will also provide access to cloud models from companies such as Google, positioning the platform as a one-stop shop for developers.
Although Apple already provides its own local models to developers, Hasani maintained that Liquid AI’s models target performance across different capabilities.
SetApp, MacPaw’s subscription-based app store, currently has more than 150,000 paying users. The company is already testing a credit-based pricing model for AI features, where users can perform a set number of AI operations depending on their credit balance and the complexity of the task.
The partnership could give SetApp developers a ready-made on-device AI infrastructure, potentially reducing the technical burden of building privacy-focused, offline-capable AI features into their apps.
Source: TechCrunch