Why Argus Is iOS‑Only — And Always Will Be

If you only skim one paragraph, make it this one: Argus is iOS‑only, on purpose, forever. Not because we dislike green robots, but because focus buys you something you can feel on day one—faster iteration, fewer “why is this broken on device X?” moments, a security posture you can defend, and an SDK that feels like it was written by someone who actually ships Swift code.

The short version

• We will never ship Android support.
• iOS is where paid apps thrive and where polish (and security) actually matters.
• Every hour we don’t spend chasing fragmentation lands in better tooling, safer defaults, and more observability for you.

A quick story You ship an AI feature. It’s good. Users love it. Then support pings you at 2 a.m. because costs spiked and someone posted your prompt to Reddit. The next morning product asks, “Can we roll back just for TestFlight users and bump limits for Pro?” If the answer is “not without a new app build,” you’re carrying infra debt you didn’t ask for.

Argus exists so that answer becomes, “Yes.” Roll back a prompt version, update rate limits by cohort, and ship a safer policy—without pushing a new binary. That’s what an iOS‑only, opinionated stack buys you.

Why iOS (and not Android) Monetization is not a dirty word. iOS still outperforms for paid apps and subscriptions; it rewards quality and UX. That matters for AI—where inference costs, latency, and user expectations collide. If you need your AI feature to be a business and not just a demo, iOS is the platform where the math pencils out.

Focus also means fewer edge cases. One platform. Coherent tooling. Fewer “device matrix” headaches. Your AI product moves faster because we can go deep instead of spreading thin. That depth shows up in the details: async/await APIs that read like Foundation, per‑user quotas that actually enforce on device and in proxy, and redaction that defaults to safe.

Security is the big one Mobile apps and secrets don’t mix. Obfuscation isn’t security—and determined actors pull keys out of binaries, memory, or logs. On iOS, the expectation is a bit higher: you encrypt, you scope, you rotate, you do the right thing by default. So we do.

• Keys never ship in your app. Argus sits between your app and providers. Credentials live server‑side with rotation and per‑environment scoping.
• Requests are policy‑checked before any provider call: limits, quotas, validation, basic jailbreak heuristics, and anomaly detection.
• Prompts never live on device. You manage them in the cloud, version them, run evals, and roll changes out safely.

This isn’t theory. We’ve all seen leaked tokens rack up real spend fast. Prevention and blast‑radius reduction are not nice‑to‑haves.

Prompts belong in the cloud Hard‑coding prompts into your binary is a time bomb. You can’t test safely, you can’t iterate quickly, and you can’t roll back when a change goes sideways. With Argus, prompts are first‑class cloud objects:

• Name + version + variables (e.g., summarize:v2 with { length: 'short' }).
• Evals you can run before rollout to guard quality, cost, and latency.
• Staged rollout and A/B, with automatic rollback triggers if metrics degrade.

A tiny taste in Swift

import Argus

let client = ArgusClient(
  appId: "YOUR_APP_ID",
  deviceId: Device.current.id,
  userId: currentUser.id // per‑user limits, analytics, and alerting
)

let out = try await client.chat(
  prompt: .named("summarize:v2"),
  variables: ["length": "short"]
)
print(out.text)

Operability from day one You shouldn’t learn about runaway costs from a credit card statement. Argus bakes in the ops layer:

• Per‑user and per‑device limits and rate caps (by plan or cohort).
• Budgets and early alerts (email, Slack, webhook) before spend gets spicy.
• A live usage pulse so you can see regressions as they happen.
• A redacted, opt‑in debug feed for safe production diagnosis.

“But what about Android?” We will not support it. Not now, not “someday.” Shipping cross‑platform infra means eating a fragmentation tax forever: incompatible SDKs, divergent OS policies, more surface area for leaks, and slower iteration. We prefer a narrower promise we can keep: be the best way to ship AI on iOS.

Who this is for If you’re building an iOS app with AI that needs to be secure, observable, and actually support a business model, we built Argus for you. You get a Swift‑native SDK, a secure proxy, prompt management + evals, and the controls to keep costs predictable.

What you get on day one

• Drop‑in SDK. Call one function. No keys in your app.
• Prompt management in the cloud with versioning, evals, and safe rollouts.
• Usage controls by user and device, budgets, alerting, and provider health signals.

We’d love to help you ship faster—and safer. Join the waitlist to get early access.