SillyTavern alternatives for phones

Three apps are worth a look. OMate Chat installs from the App Store or Google Play and runs on iPhone as well as Android. PokiTavern serves the SillyTavern frontend itself and can run a language model on the handset, so it keeps answering with the network off. If you want the project exactly as its developers ship it, install the upstream server in Termux.

PokiTavern and OMate Chat are both built by us. SillyTavern is a separate open-source project and neither of our apps is affiliated with it.

1.Which one should you install?

The question underneath is where the model lives and whose interface you look at. Everything else follows from those two answers.

2.Want an app from the App Store or Google Play?

Install OMate Chat. It is on both stores, it has an iPhone build, and it imports what you already own: PNG, JSON and charx character cards across V1, V2 and V3, world books, presets, and jsonl chat logs that keep their full swipe history.

What it adds is the part worth reading about. Characters keep two kinds of memory: summarised entries about you, and a full-text index that pulls back the old exchange relevant to what you just typed. A knowledge base lets you vectorise a pile of reference text and mount it, so only the passages a scene needs are retrieved instead of the whole thing filling the context window. Its world book engine follows SillyTavern behaviour down to the four keyword logic modes, recursion, the sticky, cooldown and delay timers and the token budget. Presets bundle the model, temperature, system prompt, prompt groups and world book mounts into one object, and each context keeps its own stack of them.

Beyond the chat box, an event book turns a plotline into unlockable events driven by a status bar, characters post to a Moments feed of their own, and a Live Page can render an interactive panel inside the conversation. There are eleven built-in tools and MCP for anything else, and Little M, the built-in assistant, will mount a preset or bind a world book for you on request. You bring your own API key, and no model runs on the phone.

3.Want the SillyTavern frontend exactly as it ships?

Two routes put the project's real interface on your screen, and PokiTavern is the short one. It boots a server implementing the SillyTavern 1.18 API, serves the official frontend on top, and carries an inference engine, so after one free in-app model download it answers in airplane mode. No subscription, no message quota, no account, no telemetry. LAN mode lets a tablet or laptop on the same Wi-Fi open the same tavern. The APK is 202 MB in version 1.1.2 and needs Android 7.0 or newer.

Our gaps are real and we would rather you knew them now. No server plugins, no AI Horde or NovelAI backends, no Stable Diffusion image generation, no speech synthesis or recognition, no expression classification, image captioning, vector storage or web search. PokiTavern is not on Google Play yet and there is no iOS build yet.

The other route is SillyTavern in Termux, and it is the genuine article. It runs the upstream Node.js server on your phone, so a new release is yours the day it ships, server plugins load, and every feature in the paragraph above works. What it costs is setup, upkeep, and a session that Android can end while your back is turned.

4.What about the other apps you may have heard of?

You may have come across a few others. MiniTavern and Tavo are phone apps that read SillyTavern character cards behind interfaces of their own, the same shelf OMate Chat sits on. ChatterUI is an open-source Android app, also with its own interface, that runs GGUF models on the device. None of the three serves the SillyTavern frontend, so your cards and world books travel but the interface and the habits do not.

5.Questions people ask

Which SillyTavern alternative should I install on Android?

OMate Chat if you want a store install with long term memory and a knowledge base behind your characters, PokiTavern if you want the SillyTavern frontend itself and replies with the network off. Both are ours. If you would rather run the project's own server, install it in Termux.

Which of these run the actual SillyTavern frontend?

PokiTavern and a Termux install. PokiTavern bundles the official frontend and serves it from a server that implements the SillyTavern 1.18 API. Termux runs the upstream Node.js server, so the frontend is the project's own. OMate Chat draws a native interface instead.

Is there a SillyTavern style app for iPhone?

OMate Chat is the one we make for iPhone and iPad, and it is on the App Store. PokiTavern is Android only and has no iOS build yet, so on an iPhone you can reach it through a browser over your own Wi-Fi and nothing more.

Do character cards move between these apps?

Yes for the common formats, because a PNG character card carries its JSON in the image tEXt chunk, V2 under the chara keyword and V3 under ccv3. OMate Chat imports PNG, JSON and charx across V1 to V3, and PokiTavern reads V2 and V3, preferring V3 when a file holds both.

Which of these work with no internet connection?

PokiTavern, once you have downloaded a model inside the app. A Termux install can too, if you run a local backend such as llama.cpp beside the server. OMate Chat calls a model provider with your own API key, so it needs a connection to generate a reply.

Is any of these the official SillyTavern app?

No. SillyTavern is a separate open-source project under AGPL-3.0 and it publishes no mobile app of its own. PokiTavern and OMate Chat are ours, and neither is affiliated with it. The closest thing to official on a phone is installing the upstream server in Termux.