0xPD33/commonplace v0.4.1

Commonplace 0.4.1

on GitHub

Commonplace is an offline research assistant for Android. It answers from Wikipedia and other reference text on the phone and cites its sources. The app has no INTERNET permission.

Changes since 0.4.0

• Faster writing with MiniCPM. The optional MiniCPM5 2B speed pack (minicpm5-2b-dspark.tar, 187 MB) holds a small draft model by OpenBMB. It proposes the next 3 tokens, and MiniCPM checks them in one step. On a Pixel 10, on 9 demanding prompts, MiniCPM wrote 15.1 instead of 10.0 tokens per second, and the first word did not come later. The answers change a little, but the release gate found the same quality on 142 questions. Settings > Advanced > Speculative decoding turns it off.
• Ask about other apps' text. Select text in another app, or share it, and pick Ask Commonplace. The app also takes shared PDF and Markdown files after you confirm.
• Diagnostics checks. Diagnostics runs a speed test (5 fixed questions) and an accuracy check (12 questions with known answers). Share, Copy or Report on GitHub sends the report, which holds none of your questions. The GitHub button opens your browser, so the app stays offline.
• Guided first run and real progress while a model loads. The answer card folds, a sheet shows each citation, and Settings is simpler.
• Safer pack installs. The app installs a pack only after it reads and checks the whole file. A full disk or a killed app leaves no partial files.
• No lost conversations. A full disk or a kill keeps the last saved conversation. The conversation and an unanswered question come back after Android kills the app in the background. History saves stopped questions and has Undo.
• A failed model load no longer leaves the app stuck. The app loads another installed model and names it.
• Stop and Unload work at once. Stop ends an answer during the prefill too, and Unload in the notification stops a running answer.
• Correct calculator numbers. "2,5% of 200" is 5, not 50, and "0.1% of 2" is 0.002, not 0. The citation check no longer counts a rounded figure as supported unless the sentence names its scale.

Install 0.4.1 over any earlier version. The installed packs stay.

Known issues

• The speed pack is tested only on a Pixel 10 (12 GB). With it, MiniCPM uses about 3.0 GB, close to Android's 3 GiB limit for a hidden app; on the Pixel 10 the app was not killed. On a phone with less memory, turn off Speculative decoding if the app closes in the background.
• Ling's answer to "How do I fix a squeaky door hinge?" can give door-fitting steps instead of the fix.
• Ling's answer to "Which country won the Eurovision Song Contest 2025, and with which song?" names the singer instead of the country, and it gives the wrong song.
• A citation can point to the wrong article, so a higher citation count does not prove that each citation is right.

Install

1. Download commonplace-0.4.1.apk below on an Android phone (64-bit ARM, Android 12 or later) and install it.
2. Open Commonplace. The first run lists the files for your phone. In Library, under Get more, tap each file and then Download. The browser saves commonplace-starter.tar (11.3 GB, 12 GB phones) or commonplace-starter-small.tar (8.1 GB, 8 GB phones) from Hugging Face. On a Pixel 10, also download Gemma 4 E2B (Tensor G5) (3.1 GB).
3. Also download the Reference shelf (commonplace-breadth.tar, 2.0 GB). With MiniCPM, also download the MiniCPM5 2B speed pack (187 MB).
4. Tap Install from Downloads and select the files. The app checks each file's SHA-256 while it copies.

SHA-256 of the APK: 1954b46d2c9f02ab2bec3de739f2a341fa49c82caeab940919c8ed7f3aae7734 (also in commonplace-0.4.1.apk.sha256). Full history: CHANGELOG.