Tavo

Tavo is a free roleplay app on the App Store and Google Play. It has an interface of its own, it reads SillyTavern character cards, and it asks you to bring your own API, which puts it on the same shelf as our OMate Chat rather than alongside SillyTavern itself. We do not make it and we are not the right people to document it.

This page is short on purpose. It answers what Tavo is, where it stands relative to SillyTavern, and what we would install for the same kind of play.

1.What kind of app is Tavo?

A native roleplay app for phones, free on both stores, with its own mobile interface and its own way of laying things out. It imports character cards you already own and stores data on the device, and it generates through a model provider you connect to with your own key, so it needs a network connection to reply.

2.Does Tavo run the SillyTavern frontend?

No. Tavo draws its own screens. SillyTavern is a separate open-source project under AGPL-3.0 and it ships no mobile app, so every phone app in this space is a third party doing its own interpretation. Reading the same character card files is not the same as running the same frontend.

If the frontend is the part you want, there are two routes. PokiTavern bundles the official one and serves it from a server implementing the SillyTavern 1.18 API, and a Termux install runs the upstream Node.js server directly.

3.What would we tell you to install?

OMate Chat, if you want a store install with more engine behind it. It is ours, it is on the App Store and Google Play, and it converts what you import into native content rather than parking it in a compatibility layer: PNG, JSON and charx cards across V1 to V3, world book JSON, preset JSON and jsonl chat logs, each import ending with a report on what came through whole. Behind that sit long-term memory and a full-text memory index, a vector-searchable knowledge base, a world book engine matching SillyTavern behaviour, presets that stack per character, story or conversation, event books driven by a status bar, a Moments feed the characters post to, tool calls and MCP.

PokiTavern, if you want the real frontend or replies with no signal. It runs a server implementing the SillyTavern 1.18 API and serves that project's own frontend, so world books, prompt templates, regex and sampling behave the way they do on a desktop install. With an inference engine inside, one free in-app model download is enough for it to answer with the network off, which no bring-your-own-API app can do. The cost is a 202 MB APK you install yourself, Android 7.0 or newer, and it is not on Google Play yet.

4.Questions people ask

Is Tavo free?

Yes, the app itself is free on both stores. What you still pay for is the model, because Tavo asks you to bring your own API. That is the normal arrangement for this kind of app, and OMate Chat works the same way.

Is Tavo the SillyTavern frontend?

No. Tavo is a native app with an interface of its own that reads SillyTavern character cards. The two routes that put the project's actual frontend on a phone are PokiTavern, which bundles it, and a Termux install, which runs the upstream server.

Can I take my character cards somewhere else?

Yes. Character cards are portable files, with the JSON stored in the PNG tEXt chunk. PokiTavern reads V2 under chara and V3 under ccv3, preferring V3 when a file carries both, and OMate Chat imports PNG, JSON and charx across V1 to V3.