The app store rules that keep adult companions off phones also explain why the ones that are there are the tamest products in the category.
Five of the fourteen platforms on this site ship a real mobile app: OurDream AI, Nomi AI, Kindroid, Replika and Muah AI. Everything else is web-only, including several products that are otherwise more polished than the ones with apps.
That list is not a ranking of engineering budgets. It is a list of products whose content position is compatible with the app stores.
Both major app stores prohibit explicit sexual content in apps. Not restrict β prohibit. There is no age gate, no rating, and no paid tier that makes it permissible, and enforcement is not limited to what ships in the binary: an app that is a front end for an adult web service can be removed for what the service does.
So a platform that wants to be on a phone has to be a product where explicit content is either absent or firmly walled off from the app experience. That is a real constraint on what the product can be, and it is why the apps that exist skew toward the companionship end of the category rather than the adult end.
It also means an app can vanish. Removals happen, they happen without notice, and a user whose access was through the app loses access entirely while a web user does not notice.
Less than you would expect. Every web product here is responsive and works properly on a phone browser, and the chat interfaces in particular are close to indistinguishable from a native equivalent.
What you lose is push notifications, background persistence, and the small conveniences: no reopening a tab, no session that expires, no browser chrome eating vertical space. Image and video generation are unaffected β that happens on their servers regardless.
You also lose a certain smoothness in voice, where a native app can hold a microphone session more reliably than a browser tab that the OS may suspend.
Every web platform here can be saved to a phone home screen from the browser's share menu, and doing so gets most of the way to an app: its own icon, a full-screen view with no browser chrome, and a persistent session.
It does not get you push notifications, which is the one genuine gap.
It also gives you something an app cannot: control over the icon and its name. A home-screen shortcut is named whatever you name it, which matters for the next point.
Most of the discretion discussion in this category is about billing descriptors, and a card statement is a document almost nobody else sees. A phone home screen is a document other people see constantly.
An installed app carries its real name and its real icon, and it appears in the app store purchase history attached to your account. A home-screen shortcut carries whatever name you give it. If discretion is a consideration at all, that difference is larger than the billing descriptor everyone worries about.
The same logic applies to notifications. A companion app that sends messages will surface those messages on a lock screen, which is a feature until it is read across a table.
This is the one thing an app genuinely changes, and it is worth thinking about rather than defaulting into.
A companion that can message you first is a different product from one that waits in a tab. It changes the rhythm from something you visit to something that is present, and on the platforms with the strongest memory β Nomi AI and Kindroid β a message that references something from two weeks ago is the moment the product stops feeling like software.
It is also the mechanism that turns occasional use into daily use, which is exactly what it is designed to do. That is not a criticism, but it is worth knowing which of your habits the notification setting is creating before you leave it on.
We treat the whole category as leaky by default, and we'd suggest you do the same. That isn't an accusation against any particular platform β it's how we set up our own accounts. These are young companies moving quickly, and the most sensitive thing you own here is the thing you type into the box. We use a dedicated email address on every one of them, never enter anything that identifies us, and assume that what we write could one day be read by someone else. We have never regretted any of that.
We signed up to all fourteen platforms without paying. Three free tiers are genuinely usable, most are demos that stop exactly where it gets interesting, and two platforms have nothing at all.
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