Brief reads your iMessages on your Mac, finds the things you actually need to act on — appointments, tasks, payments, follow-ups — and lines them up on your iPhone for a quick review. Plus a tight morning brief.
What is Brief? · 45 seconds
Brief runs on your Mac and reviews on your iPhone. You need the Mac app — the iPhone app is the remote.
Free · macOS 14+ and iOS 17+ · notarized by Apple
Your Mac does the reading. Your iPhone is mission control.
The Brief menu-bar app reads your Messages on a schedule and surfaces only the genuinely actionable stuff — not "haha" and "on my way."
A clean, prioritized queue. Each item is summarized in plain language, color-coded Work or Personal, with the date and time already pulled out.
Tap a card for a pre-filled draft — title, date, notes — edit anything, then add it straight to Apple Reminders or Calendar.
Smart filtering means only real action items show up. Swipe, draft, done.
Weather, your day, the news that matters to you, your teams' scores, and your overnight message catch-up — in one tight briefing.
Brief reads your messages on your own devices. Smart Filter and Apple Intelligence run entirely on your Mac; Cloud AI sends the candidate message to a model provider for the judgment, and we never store it. Only the extracted action syncs to your phone.
Here is what each plan costs.
The catch-and-review core, on your own devices.
Pro features, your tokens.
Better catching, and the full morning brief.
Everything, plus the daily content modules.
It reads them on your own Mac to find action items. What happens next depends on your filter engine, not your plan: with Smart Filter or Apple Intelligence the judgment happens on your Mac and your message text never leaves it; with Cloud AI, Brief sends the candidate message and the two or three before it to a model provider to catch more — used only for that one request, never stored by us, never used to train models. The extracted action — a title, short summary, the sender's number and the contact name matched on your device — is saved to your account so you can review it on your phone. Either way only the extracted action and your routing decisions sync to your iPhone. We never sell or share your data. The details are in the privacy policy.
Your iMessage history lives in a local, protected database on your Mac (~/Library/Messages/chat.db). Full Disk Access is the only permission macOS offers for reading it. It's a wider door than Brief needs — it covers the rest of your files too — but Brief reads Messages and nothing else. Where the judgment happens depends on your filter engine, not your plan: Smart Filter and Apple Intelligence run on your Mac, while Cloud AI sends candidate messages to a model provider — the privacy policy says what each sends. You grant it once, in System Settings → Privacy & Security, and Brief walks you through it. More on that trade-off, and what to do if you'd rather not extend it.
Because that's where the data is. iMessage history only exists on your Mac in a form an app can read, so the Mac app does the scanning. The iPhone app is where you actually review and route — which is where you are when you need it. Neither half is much use alone.
No. Scheduled scans are suppressed between 10 PM and 6 AM by default, so Brief isn't working — or notifying — while you're asleep. You can turn quiet hours off in settings if you want it running around the clock.
There are four plans: Free (50 actioned items per month, on-device filtering), Bring Your Own Key at $6.99/month for cloud filtering on your own API key, Pro at $16.99/month for cloud filtering on ours plus the full morning brief, and Premium at $24.99/month which adds the daily content modules. New subscribers get their first month of Premium — or Bring Your Own Key — free. Full breakdown here.
On the App Store. It's the review half — you also need the free Mac app, which does the scanning; the download page walks you through both.
Not today. Brief reads iMessage on macOS. If that's a dealbreaker for you, tell us at hello@justbriefme.app — it's useful to know.