--- title: "MDflow Mobile: A Markdown App for iPhone and iPad (2026)" description: "MDflow Mobile is a native markdown app for iPhone and iPad — browse and search your workspace, edit with autosave, read GFM, and unlock encrypted notes with Face ID." author: "MDflow" date: 2026-07-12 reading_time: "13 min" canonical_url: https://mdflow.cz/blog/mdflow-mobile-app md_url: https://mdflow.cz/blog/mdflow-mobile-app.md --- # MDflow Mobile: A Markdown App for iPhone and iPad (2026) *Published July 12, 2026 · 13 min read* Your MDflow workspace has lived in the browser since day one — a fast place to write Markdown, organize it into folders and workspaces, share it, and hand it to AI agents. The one thing it could not do was ride along in your pocket. Now it can: **MDflow Mobile is a native iOS app for iPhone and iPad**, and it signs into the same account you already use at [mdflow.cz](/). This post is an honest tour of what the app does today, where it fits alongside the web workspace, and what it deliberately leaves to the bigger screen. We make MDflow, so treat this as the maker's own walkthrough — but every feature below is one you can verify by installing the app. > **TL;DR** — MDflow Mobile is a **free, native markdown app for iPhone and iPad**. Sign in with Apple, Google, GitHub, or Microsoft on your existing account, then browse and search your whole workspace, read GitHub-Flavored Markdown (tables, task lists, code, images), and edit with reliable autosave. It adds two things the web can't: **Share to MDflow** from any app's share sheet, and **Face ID unlock** for password-encrypted notes. [Download it on the App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mdflow-mobile-markdown/id6785617933) or [start free on the web](/login). ## What is the MDflow mobile app? **The MDflow mobile app is a free, native iOS companion to the MDflow web workspace.** It runs on iPhone and iPad, it is built entirely in SwiftUI with Apple's iOS 26 "Liquid Glass" design, and it talks to the same backend as the website — so there is no separate account, no export/import step, and no second copy of your notes to keep in sync. Open the app and your workspaces, folders, and documents are simply there. A few facts worth stating up front, because they shape what the app is for: - **It is a companion, not a replacement.** The phone is built for the things you do on the move — capturing an idea, reading a document, searching for something, fixing a typo. The wider-screen work (uploading images, managing shares and collections, browsing version history) stays in the [web app](/features), where there is room for it. - **It is free and private.** The app is free to download, adds no separate subscription, and its App Store privacy manifest declares **no tracking and no collected data**. Any Pro features you pay for are account-level and apply everywhere. - **It is genuinely native.** This is not a website in a wrapper. It uses native iOS navigation, search, pull-to-refresh, share-sheet integration, and biometric unlock, and it follows your system light or dark appearance automatically. You will find it on the App Store as **MDflow Mobile Markdown**, in the Developer Tools category. ## Key features Here is what the app actually does today, grouped the way you would use it. ### Sign in on the same account, in one tap Open the app and sign in with **Apple, Google, GitHub, or Microsoft** — the same four providers as the web. Sign in with Apple is fully native (the system sheet, with Face ID), and the others use Apple's secure web sign-in flow. Because MDflow Mobile authenticates against the same backend as the website, there is nothing to link or pair: the account you already have *is* your mobile account. Signing out clears the cached workspace from the device, so a shared phone never leaks the last person's notes. ### Your whole workspace, in your pocket The home screen shows your **Favorites** and your top-level folders; tap in to walk an **arbitrarily deep folder tree** down to individual documents. If you keep separate [workspaces](/features) for work, personal, and side projects, a switcher in the toolbar swaps the entire view to the workspace you pick. Folder rows show how many items are inside, document rows show a relative "edited 5m ago" timestamp, and a **pull-to-refresh** gesture grabs the latest from your account. Star a document to add it to Favorites for one-tap access next time. ### Fast full-text search Tap the search bar and MDflow searches your **entire workspace by title and body text**, not just filenames, and takes you straight to the match. It is the quickest way to find that one note when you are standing in a queue and cannot remember which folder you filed it in. ### Read GitHub-Flavored Markdown, rendered properly MDflow Mobile renders your Markdown with the same GitHub-Flavored Markdown (GFM) rules you would expect on a desktop, powered by the well-tested [swift-markdown-ui](https://github.com/gonzalezreal/swift-markdown-ui) library on top of cmark-gfm. That means **headings, lists, task lists, tables, code blocks, blockquotes, dividers, and images** all render cleanly: ```markdown ## This week - [x] Draft the announcement - [ ] Ship the landing page - [ ] Publish the changelog | Task | Owner | Due | | ----------- | ----- | --------- | | Landing | Sam | Wed | ``` A per-document **Edit / Preview toggle** flips between the raw Markdown and the rendered view, and a persistent **text-zoom** control lets you size the text comfortably for reading on a small screen. A small nicety: a bare `[ ]` checkbox typed without a list marker still renders as a proper task item in preview, while your stored source is left exactly as you wrote it. ### Edit with reliable autosave The editor is a clean, monospaced Markdown surface with **debounced autosave**: a few hundred milliseconds after you stop typing, your changes are written to your account, and a live indicator shows **Saving… / Saved / Not saved** so you always know where you stand. Leave the screen and any pending edit is flushed first. It is designed for the mobile reality of quick, interruptible edits — jot a line, get pulled away, come back, and nothing is lost. ### Create and organize on the go You are not limited to reading. From the phone you can **create documents** (titles are automatically normalized to end in `.md`), **rename** them, **move** them into another folder with an indented folder picker, **delete** them with a confirmation, and toggle **favorite**. You can also **create nested folders**, rename them, and delete them. It is enough to keep your workspace tidy without waiting until you are back at a computer. ### Lock notes with encryption and Face ID This is where the mobile app quietly shines. You can **encrypt any document with a password**, and the app does the crypto **on the device**: AES-256-GCM with a key derived by PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 at **600,000 iterations**. Crucially, it uses the **same encrypted format as the MDflow web app**: ```text mdflow-enc:v1: ``` So a note you encrypt in your browser opens on your phone with the same password, and vice versa — the server only ever stores ciphertext either way. After you unlock a document once, the derived key is stored in the device Keychain behind biometric protection, so you can reopen it with a glance using **Face ID or Touch ID** instead of retyping the password. The app is upfront about the trade-off, too: there is **no recovery** — forget the password and the document cannot be opened. (For the full story on how this model works, see our post on [client-side encryption for online notes](/blog/client-side-encryption-for-online-notes).) ### Share to MDflow from any app Reading something in Safari, Mail, or another app that you want to keep? Tap the system **Share** button, pick **MDflow**, and the text or file is captured into your workspace as a new Markdown document. The share extension derives a sensible title, and the main app imports the item into an **"iOS" folder** the next time you open it. Because the capture is queued on the device, this works **even if you are offline or signed out** — the note lands in your workspace as soon as the app is next online. It turns your whole phone into an inbox for your Markdown workspace. ### A native iOS 26 experience Everything above is wrapped in a real iOS app: Apple's iOS 26 Liquid Glass surfaces and floating controls, native segmented controls, search, popovers, sheets and alerts, and deep-link support. It **follows your system light/dark setting** automatically, in MDflow's familiar green. Terms and Privacy open in-app, and account actions — including **deleting your account** — are one menu away. ## Why a native markdown app matters **Because the value of a Markdown workspace is only fully realized when it is with you everywhere, not just at your desk.** A hosted workspace already means your notes are the same on every device; a good native app is what makes reaching them on a phone feel instant instead of like loading a website. Three benefits stand out: 1. **Capture at the moment it happens.** Ideas, links, and to-dos rarely arrive while you are sitting at a keyboard. Share to MDflow and quick document creation mean the thought goes into the right workspace immediately, in plain Markdown you own — not into yet another silo you will have to migrate later. 2. **Read and reference anywhere.** Meeting notes, a runbook, a checklist, a draft — rendered cleanly with real tables and task lists, searchable across the whole workspace, sized to be readable one-handed. 3. **Security that travels.** The most sensitive notes — credentials, personal records — can be encrypted on-device and gated behind Face ID, so the convenience of having them on your phone does not cost you their privacy. And because MDflow stores **plain Markdown**, nothing you write on the phone is trapped there. It is the same portable text you can export, share, or hand to an AI agent from the web. ## How the mobile app fits the MDflow ecosystem **The phone is one of several ways into a single workspace — alongside the web editor, the [HTTP API](/docs/api), and the [remote MCP server](/docs/mcp) for AI agents.** MDflow is deliberately a small, well-connected surface, and the mobile app is honest about its role within it. Think of it as division of labor: - **On the phone:** capture, read, search, quick edits, and unlocking encrypted notes with Face ID. - **On the web:** the wider-screen work — uploading and pasting images, managing public and private [sharing](/features), building [collections](/features), reading [version history](/blog/version-control-for-documents), the [split editor](/), and the aggregated [Tasks](/markdown-tasks) view that pulls every checkbox in your workspace into one list. - **Over MCP and the API:** your AI agents. ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Codex can read and write the same workspace through MDflow's [remote MCP server](/blog/connect-chatgpt-claude-to-your-notes), so an agent can draft or update a document that you then read and edit on your phone minutes later. That last point is the quiet payoff of a shared, hosted workspace: the note an agent writes for you at your desk is the note you pull up on the train, on the same account, with no export in between. If you want the bigger picture of why a hosted, agent-ready workspace beats a local vault for this, we lay it out in [MDflow vs Obsidian for the AI era](/blog/mdflow-vs-obsidian-ai-era). ## Who gets the most out of it The mobile app is not trying to be everything to everyone. It fits some people especially well: 1. **Existing MDflow users** who want their workspace on their phone — this is the obvious one, and it is free. 2. **People who capture on the move** — clipping articles, links, and quick thoughts into a real Markdown workspace via the share sheet. 3. **Readers and reviewers** — anyone who needs to pull up and search notes, runbooks, or docs away from a desk, rendered properly. 4. **Privacy-conscious note keepers** — the on-device, Face-ID-gated encryption makes the phone a safe place for sensitive Markdown. 5. **AI-workflow people** — those whose agents write to MDflow over MCP and who want to read and tweak the results on mobile. If your work depends on image uploads, in-app sharing and comments, or a multi-pane editor, you will still spend most of that time on the web — and that is by design. ## What's next This is direction, not a dated promise. The mobile app shipped as a focused 1.0, and the natural places to grow it are the ones where the gap between phone and web is most felt: **offline reading and editing** so your notes work on a plane, an **iPad-optimized multi-column layout** that uses the larger screen, and steadily closing the parity gap on things like images and sharing where it makes sense on a small screen. The throughline is unchanged — keep MDflow a single workspace that humans and their agents reach from wherever they are. ## The bottom line MDflow Mobile brings your Markdown workspace to iPhone and iPad as a fast, native, free app. It is built for capture, reading, search, and quick edits, with two genuinely mobile-first touches — **Share to MDflow** from any app and **Face ID unlock** for encrypted notes — on the same account and the same plain Markdown you already use on the web. It is honest about being a companion to the web workspace, and that focus is what makes it feel light. [Download on the App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mdflow-mobile-markdown/id6785617933) · [Start free](/login) · [Connect an AI agent](/docs/mcp) · [See all features](/features) ## Frequently asked questions ### Is there an MDflow app for iPhone? Yes. MDflow Mobile is a free native iOS app for iPhone and iPad, available on the App Store. It signs into your existing MDflow account, so the folders, documents, and workspaces you see on the phone are the same ones you use at mdflow.cz. It is a companion to the web workspace: use the phone to capture, read, search, and make quick edits, and the web app for the wider-screen work like sharing and image uploads. ### Is the MDflow mobile app free? Yes, the app is free to download and use. It does not add a separate subscription; it signs into the same MDflow account you already have, and any Pro features you pay for are account-level and shared across the web and the phone. The app's privacy manifest declares no tracking and no collected data. ### Can I use MDflow on iPad? Yes. MDflow Mobile is a universal app that runs on both iPhone and iPad in all orientations. It uses a single-column layout on both devices, so the multi-pane experiences like split view live on the web app; on iPad you get the same clean browse, read, search, and edit flow as on iPhone, on a larger screen. ### Does the MDflow mobile app work offline? Editing needs a connection, because autosave writes changes straight to your account. The one thing that works without a connection is Share to MDflow: when you send text or a file to MDflow from another app's share sheet, it is queued on the device and imported the next time the app is online and signed in. Reading and editing existing documents currently require network access. ### How does document encryption work on the MDflow iPhone app? You can lock any document with a password. The app encrypts the body on-device with AES-256-GCM, deriving the key with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations, and uses the same format as the MDflow web app — so a note you encrypt in your browser opens on your phone with the same password. After the first unlock you can reopen it with Face ID or Touch ID. There is no recovery: if you forget the password, the document cannot be opened. ## Further reading - [MDflow Mobile Markdown on the App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mdflow-mobile-markdown/id6785617933) — download the app for iPhone and iPad. - [All MDflow features](/features) — the full picture of the web workspace the app connects to. - [Client-side encryption for notes you store online](/blog/client-side-encryption-for-online-notes) — how the encryption the app unlocks with Face ID actually works. - [How to give ChatGPT and Claude access to your notes](/blog/connect-chatgpt-claude-to-your-notes) — connect an AI agent to the same workspace. - [MDflow vs Obsidian for the AI era](/blog/mdflow-vs-obsidian-ai-era) — why a hosted, agent-ready workspace fits mobile and AI workflows. - [MDflow MCP docs](/docs/mcp) and [API docs](/docs/api) — the other ways into your workspace.