As a lifelong Mac user, I have a particular affinity for native applications. For a long time, most of the AI models were only useable through a web browser. But the model providers have slowly been rolling out fully native apps for their products. We now have native apps for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, among others. If you’re really into large language models, you likely also know a bit about using them via command line tools. Ollama has been the go-to solution for easily running models on your Mac via the Terminal. There have been third-party solutions that integrate with Ollama to offer proper graphic user interfaces, but none of them have quite made an impression. All of this makes local models a bit tedious to start using for the average person. The good news is that starting today you can easily install a native macOS Ollama app with the click of a button and get yourself using local large language models without ever launching the command line.

Ollama’s macOS app is really well-designed. It’s as simple as it can possibly be and that makes it feel more modern than a lot of other Mac apps. Anyone that has used the official ChatGPT Mac app will feel right at home, but they will quickly notice that the model names are quite different. The app makes it easy to install various versions of Gemma 3, Deepseek R1, and Qwen 3. Instead of having to use a command line for installation, you can simply type a prompt, select a model, and it will download it for you. You can use these models just like you’d use traditional foundation models on the web, of course without web search. The benefits of this though are that your chats are entirely offline and private and you can generate code without an internet connection.

There are a handful of other features that I am really happy to see included. You can customize the context window, expose Ollama to other devices, rename chats, and even hook the app up to your Ollama account. To make it all that much more exciting, you can also use multi-modal models locally. That means you can share images and documents with models in the Ollama app and have them be analyzed for you. The whole thing is just beautifully executed. In the unlikely event that you are a Windows user reading this, I have good news for you too. Ollama also shipped a native Windows app. Local models for the win!