MacPaw partners with Liquid AI to build on-device inference for its app store

Ukraine-based app developer MacPaw has partnered with Liquid AI to power its products with locally hosted AI models, and eventually make the resulting tech stack available to developers. The company is also preparing its SetApp app store, which has more than 150,000 paying users, for AI apps with credit-based plans.

MacPaw is currently working on its AI assistant Eney, unveiled last year, and now plans to build a locally hosted version. It has enlisted Liquid AI to develop an on-device inference system called Elix, along with a local memory system. “Before training our models, we select an architecture that is different and tailored to the hardware. That allows us to really have the most efficient version of intelligence that runs directly on the device, with benefits like privacy and security,” Liquid AI co-founder and CEO Ramin Hasani told TechCrunch. MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan said locally hosted AI models will also let users run assistants and agentic workflows offline.

Apple already provides its own local models to developers, but Hasani said Liquid AI’s models focus on performance across different capabilities. He added that the company is also building a customization stack around its models, so that with user input the models can use that data to improve, with the goal of making them adaptable and more intelligent over time.

MacPaw plans to focus more on AI apps for SetApp going forward. Once it locks in the local-processing architecture with Liquid AI, the company wants to make that technology available to developers so they can build on-device inference into their own apps; Kosovan said the platform will also provide access to cloud models from companies like Google, positioning it as a one-stop shop for developers. MacPaw is already experimenting with credit-based pricing for the app store, where users perform a set number of AI operations based on the credits they hold and the complexity of the task.

Why it matters

MacPaw’s move to bundle an on-device AI stack into a subscription app store is a bet that developer-facing infrastructure — not just consumer AI features — is where a mid-size platform can differentiate against Apple’s own local-model offering.