Pellet on mobile

On iPhone, iPad and Android it’s the same Pellet, laid out for a smaller screen. Same vault, same files, same features — not a cut-down companion.

Getting your vault there

Two options:

Sync — pair the device with your sync relay and the vault arrives. Start the group on your desktop, then join from here with the code it gives you.
Open a folder on the device — on iOS, put the vault in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone/iPad and open it through the Files app. A file iCloud has moved off the device to save space stays in the vault: Pellet asks iCloud for it, and the note reads as not yet downloaded until it arrives.

How it’s laid out

Below a phone-sized width, the three-column layout becomes a stack: folders, then the note list, then the document, with a back button to climb out. A bottom bar carries six labelled buttons — Notes, Tasks, Calendar, New, Today and More — and More is a sheet holding search, tags, properties, the Table, the Board, the graph, the map and Settings.

Tabs and split panes collapse to a single document — there isn’t room for a tab strip on a phone, and a workspace saved on your desktop arrives simplified rather than broken.

A phone stays in portrait. The stack above is a column, and turning the phone sideways gave it a shape nothing was laid out for. Tablets are unaffected and rotate as they always did — landscape is most of the point of a tablet for handwriting and the Table.

Handwriting

.ink pages take handwriting with pressure, on every platform Pellet runs on — Android and desktop included. See Canvas and drawing.

What the iPad has to itself is the engine underneath. There, Pellet draws through PencilKit, Apple’s own drawing system, which renders on the native side rather than in the web canvas the other platforms use. An Apple Pencil gets that platform’s own feel for pressure and tilt, and pinch-to-zoom is handled by PencilKit rather than by Pellet.

Tap New and the sheet has quite a few cards in it now. If you never make a Canvas, or never scan anything, tap Edit at the top of the sheet: every card becomes a switch, and you can drag them into the order you want by their handle. Done puts it back.

Nothing is thrown away — a card you switch off is still there while you’re editing, just dimmed, so turning it back on is one tap. There’s a Reset to the default if you’d rather start over.

This is per device and applies to your phone. An iPad gets New as a menu rather than a grid of cards, so there’s nothing to thin out there.

The camera

Three things Pellet can do with the camera on a phone or a tablet. They’re in the New menu and under More ▸ Capture, and there’s a camera button in the row above the keyboard while you’re writing, so a photo can go straight into the sentence you’re in the middle of. On an iPad that row appears along the bottom while you’re typing in a note, and goes away when the keyboard does.

Photo opens the camera, and the picture is saved into your vault as an ordinary image file. If you started from a note or a task, it’s embedded where your cursor was.

Scan Doc is a proper scanner: hold the phone over a page, it finds the edges and straightens it out, and you can keep shooting pages. Every page comes back as its own image, all of them added to your note in order.

Scan Text reads the words off a page and puts the text in your note — no picture at all. It’s for when you want what the page says rather than a photo of it. The reading happens on your device, so it works on a plane, and the picture is thrown away as soon as it’s been read.

There’s nothing to set up and nothing to choose. Photos and scans are filed in your Attachments folder like anything else you add to a note, and none of it is uploaded anywhere.

One thing worth knowing: if you switch to a different note while the camera is open, Pellet won’t write into the note you’ve moved on to. It saves the photo and tells you what it’s called, so you can put it where you want it. Scanned text has no file to fall back on, so that becomes a new note instead.

Recording

New Recording in the new-document menu records with your device’s own microphone, and keeps going in the background and from the lock screen. See Voice notes and recordings.

Transcribing a recording works here too, with one thing to know: choose Google (Gemini) rather than OpenAI. The way OpenAI wants an audio file uploaded isn’t something a phone can do, and Pellet says so rather than failing quietly.

Touch

Controls get bigger automatically on a touch screen — every button reaches at least 44pt, a fingertip-sized target. You can force it either way in Appearance.

Swipe a row in a list for its actions — Rename, Archive and Delete. Any file, not just notes and tasks: a PDF, an image or an EPUB swipes open the same tray.

What’s desktop-only

Each of these needs the app to listen on a network socket, which the mobile builds don’t do — on iOS because the system won’t allow it. Rather than show you a button that can’t work, mobile hides them:

Google Calendar sign-in needs a temporary local web server to catch the sign-in redirect. Sign in on your desktop and the connection travels to your phone with your settings — from then on your Google calendars work here normally. Apple and subscribed calendars can be set up on mobile directly.
The local API (AI & MCP) needs a listening socket of its own. Handwriting transcription is unaffected and stays in Settings on mobile.
Hosting a sync relay, for the same reason — which is why a sync group is created on the desktop and joined from the phone.
Linked folders — a folder that is a symbolic link or junction is ignored on mobile. It isn’t followed and it isn’t synced, so its notes are desktop-only.

Everything else — notes, links, tasks, boards, calendar, canvas, whiteboards, handwriting, PDFs, recording, sync — works on both.