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.
Free during the beta · Mac + iPhone · macOS 14+ and iOS 17+
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. The full text never leaves your Mac — only short excerpts sync so you can review on your phone.
Free during the beta — all features unlocked for early testers. Here's what it costs afterwards.
The catch-and-review core, on your own devices.
Better catching, and the full morning brief.
Everything, plus the daily content modules.
It reads them on your own Mac to find action items. The full text never leaves your device — only short excerpts and your routing decisions sync so you can review on your iPhone. We never sell your data, share it, or use it to train models. 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 Apple's required — and only supported — way for an app to read it. You grant it once, in System Settings → Privacy & Security, and Brief walks you through it. Brief uses it to read Messages and nothing else, and the analysis happens on your Mac.
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.
Nothing during the beta — every feature is unlocked for early testers. Afterwards there's a free tier (200 items, on-device filtering), Pro at $16.99/month for cloud AI filtering and the full morning brief, and Premium at $24.99/month which adds the daily content modules. Beta testers keep a founding-member rate. Full breakdown here.
Through TestFlight, Apple's official beta tool — the download page walks you through both apps. The beta is capped at 100 testers.
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.
Free during the beta. Install both apps and see what it catches in your first scan.
Not ready to install? Leave your email and we'll send occasional updates.