LoAi: Offline AI Image Generator for iPhone & Android — Text, Sketch & Photo to Image

Published 16 September 2026 · 6 min read

LoAi: sketch it, generate it. Offline AI image generation turning a child's house drawing, a sailboat sketch and a text prompt into finished images
Quick answer LoAi started as an offline AI chatbot. With version 1.1 it is now also a full AI image generator that runs entirely on your phone. Type a prompt, draw a rough sketch or pick a photo, and LoAi creates the image on-device with no internet, no credits and no subscription. It is free on iPhone and Android, and the private offline chat is still built in.
What changed: LoAi now has three tabs: Chat, Create and Gallery. Create is new. It runs Stable Diffusion models locally, so everything you make is generated by the chip in your pocket, not by someone else's server.

Three ways to create an image

1. Text to image

Describe what you want, pick a style and tap Generate. Your phone does the rest. The example below came from a plain one-line prompt: "A modern SUV driving around downtown LA" with the Photo style selected.

LoAi text to image screen: prompt 'A modern SUV driving around downtown LA' produces a photorealistic white SUV on a city street LoAi style presets: Surprise me, None, Photo, Anime, Painting, 3D and Cinematic, with four sample images

Left: a prompt becomes a photo. Right: one tap switches the style.

Stuck for ideas? Surprise me fills in a random prompt. There is also an optional negative prompt field, where you list things you don't want in the picture.

2. Sketch to image

This is the fun one. Open the built-in canvas, draw a few rough lines, and LoAi keeps your composition while filling in the detail. You don't need any drawing skill. These are real inputs and outputs:

Child-like sketch of a brown house, green grass, blue birds and an orange sun LoAi result: a weathered farmhouse in a golden field with birds flying under a bright sky

A 10-second doodle becomes a farmhouse at golden hour.

Simple line sketch of a sailboat on blue waves with an orange sun LoAi result: a sailboat on calm water at sunset

A stick-figure sailboat becomes a sunset scene.

A Strength slider (default 0.60) controls how closely the result follows your sketch. Lower values stay close to your lines. Higher values give the model more freedom to reinterpret them.

LoAi Create screen in Sketch mode showing the sketch, Strength slider, DreamShaper 8 LCM model and size options 512x512, 512x768, 768x512
The Create screen in Sketch mode: strength, model and size.

3. Photo to image

Pick any photo from your gallery and reimagine it in a new style. Turn a holiday snap into an oil painting, or a pet photo into an anime character. The same Strength slider decides whether the result stays close to the original or drifts far away from it.

One-tap styles

Style presets add the right wording to your prompt for you, so you don't have to learn prompt engineering. Choose from Photo, Anime, Painting, 3D or Cinematic, or pick None to write everything yourself.

Photo style: realistic portrait of a young man in a forestPhoto
Anime style: silver-haired character by a windowAnime
Painting style: lighthouse on a cliff with crashing wavesPainting
3D style: small green robot among potted plants3D

All four images were generated on a phone, fully offline.

The image models

LoAi runs Stable Diffusion 1.5 class models through stable-diffusion.cpp, an open-source engine built for running diffusion models on everyday hardware. You download the models you want from a curated catalog and can switch between them at any time:

ModelBest forDownloadDefault steps
DreamShaper 8 LCMAll-round, a good first pick~1.6 GB5
DreamShaper 8 LCM (HQ)Same model, slightly finer detail, more RAM~1.8 GB5
Realistic Vision 6 HyperPhotorealistic people, places and products~1.6 GB6
Anything v3 LCMAnime and illustration~1.6 GB5
DMD2 DreamShaperSpeed: good results in 1–4 steps~1.6 GB4

These are "few-step" models (LCM, Hyper and DMD2). A classic diffusion model needs 25–50 denoising steps per image, which is far too slow on a phone. These need 4–6, and that is what makes on-device generation practical. Output sizes are 512×512 (square), 512×768 (portrait) and 768×512 (landscape).

If you like to tinker, the Advanced panel exposes steps, guidance, seed and size.

Every image is saved on your device together with the prompt, seed and settings that produced it. Find one you like, load its settings back into Create, and change a single word, the style or the seed. It is the easiest way to refine a result without starting from scratch.

Why offline matters for image generation

Almost every popular AI image generator runs in the cloud. You type a prompt, it goes to a server, and you pay in credits, a monthly subscription, or both. LoAi takes the opposite approach:

LoAi vs. a typical cloud image generator
LoAiTypical cloud generator
Where it runsOn your phoneTheir servers
Internet needed?Only for the one-time model downloadEvery image
Cost per imageFree, unlimitedCredits or a monthly plan
Your prompts and photosNever leave the deviceUploaded to a server
Queue / rate limitsNoneCommon on free tiers
Top-end image qualityGood, 512–768 pxHigher, larger images

The privacy point matters most in photo to image mode. If you're restyling pictures of your kids, your home or yourself, it's reassuring to know those photos never leave your phone.

The AI chatbot is still here

Nothing was taken away. LoAi's offline chat still runs language models directly on your phone, with real-time streaming, even in airplane mode:

To keep things running smoothly, LoAi never holds a chat model and an image model in memory at the same time. When you switch to Create, it frees the chat model first.

Honest caveats

What to expect from on-device image generation: In exchange you get unlimited images, no subscription, no upload, and a generator that works on a plane.

What's free and what's Pro

FeatureFreeLoAi Pro (one-time)
Text, sketch and photo to image✓ Unlimited✓ Unlimited
All catalog image models and styles
Gallery with saved settings
Offline AI chat, vision and document Q&A
Import your own custom models
Ad-free

There are no credits and no monthly subscription. Pro is a single purchase for people who want an ad-free experience or want to load their own models.

LoAi app icon

LoAi — Offline Image Generator

Sketch it. Generate it. Free AI image generation and private AI chat that run 100% on your phone. Text, sketch or photo to art, with no internet, no credits and no subscription. iOS & Android.

FAQ

Is LoAi's image generator really free?

Yes. Image generation is unlimited, with no credits, no daily caps and no subscription. The free version shows ads. An optional one-time Pro purchase removes them and unlocks importing custom models.

Does LoAi need the internet to generate images?

Only to download a model the first time. Each image model is about 1.6 GB, plus a 10 MB image decoder. After that, every image is generated on your phone and the app works in airplane mode.

How long does it take to generate an image on a phone?

Typically 20–60 seconds, depending on your phone, the model, the step count and the image size. DMD2 DreamShaper is the fastest and can produce a usable image in 1–4 steps. Generation uses a noticeable amount of battery.

What AI image models does LoAi use?

Stable Diffusion 1.5 class models running locally through stable-diffusion.cpp: DreamShaper 8 LCM (standard and HQ), Realistic Vision 6 Hyper, Anything v3 LCM and DMD2 DreamShaper.

Can I turn my own drawing or photo into AI art?

Yes. Sketch mode gives you a canvas: draw rough lines and LoAi keeps your composition while filling in detail. Photo mode reimagines any picture from your gallery. In both, the Strength slider controls how far the result moves away from your input.

Are my prompts and images private?

Generation happens entirely on your device. Your prompts, sketches, photos and results are never uploaded to a server, and they are stored in the gallery on your phone.

Is the AI chatbot still in LoAi?

Yes. Offline chat with Llama 3.2, Gemma 3, Gemma 4, Phi-3.5 Mini, BitNet b1.58 and more is still there, along with photo description and questions about PDF, Word, Excel and text files.

Which phones does LoAi work on?

iPhone (iOS 15 or later) and Android. Image generation works best on a reasonably recent phone with enough free memory and about 1.6 GB of free storage per image model.

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