Yesterday's Top Launches: 5 Tools from February 2, 2026
Several new apps launched on February 2nd, including Dottie, a privacy-focused AI journal that operates entirely offline.
For anyone tracking the release radar, February 2nd brought a curious mix of new developer tools and consumer-facing apps, all landing at once. It’s a spread that covers everything from deeply personal AI to practical utilities, reflecting a growing trend toward specialization. If your interests span productivity, privacy, or just finding clever new applications, yesterday had something worth a look.
Dottie
In an era where our digital thoughts often feel like public property, Dottie arrives as a quiet rebuttal. This is a private AI journal that runs entirely on your device. Instead of sending your reflections to the cloud, it uses Apple Intelligence to process everything locally. The appeal here is starkly simple: what you write never leaves your phone. It’s designed for the person who wants the thoughtful prompting and conversational style of a modern AI assistant but can’t stomach the idea of their innermost thoughts becoming training data.
The implementation is smart. By leveraging the on-device capabilities of Apple’s ecosystem, Dottie sidesteps the biggest privacy concerns associated with AI. You get the benefit of a language model helping you unpack your day or brainstorm ideas, but with the assurance of complete confidentiality. It’s free, which feels almost necessary for an app asking for this level of trust. The main limitation is its exclusivity to the mobile platform, making it less ideal for long-form journalers who prefer a physical keyboard. But for quick, secure daily check-ins, Dottie seems to have found its niche.
Yomio
How much did that quick grocery trip really cost? If you’re someone who collects receipts but rarely analyzes them, Yomio aims to bridge the gap between passive collecting and active understanding. This app scans your receipts and performs an item-by-item breakdown, automatically categorizing your spending. The promise is to move beyond just tracking total amounts and instead give you insights into your actual habits—like how much you’re truly spending on coffee versus snacks each month.
The freemium model suggests there’s a deeper layer of analytics or features locked behind a subscription, which is fairly standard for financial tools. The real test for Yomio will be the accuracy of its scanning and categorization. If it can reliably distinguish between similar items from different stores, it could become a genuinely useful tool for budget-conscious individuals and families. It’s not trying to replace a full-fledged accounting app, but rather to serve as a lightweight, actionable lens on your everyday purchases.
Good Assistant
Ambition is easy; follow-through is hard. Good Assistant positions itself as the AI companion that helps with the latter. Unlike a simple reminder app, it’s designed to learn about your goals and world, then proactively help you plan, research, and execute. Want to train for a marathon? It might help map out a training schedule, suggest running routes, and remind you to hydrate. Planning a complex project? It could assist in breaking down tasks and finding relevant information.
Being available on both web and mobile is a significant advantage, allowing you to manage goals from your desktop and receive nudges on the go. The fact that it’s free is intriguing and raises questions about its long-term sustainability. Is this a passion project, or is there a future premium tier on the horizon? As with any AI that “learns about your world,” the potential is huge, but so is the need for thoughtful design to avoid becoming overly intrusive. For the naturally organized person, it might be overkill, but for anyone who struggles with executive function, Good Assistant could be a game-changer.
Compressor
Sometimes, you just need a tool that does one thing exceptionally well without any fuss. Compressor for Android is precisely that. It’s a native video compression app built with Kotlin and Android’s Media3 transformer pipelines, which is a technical way of saying it’s built for speed and efficiency. The developer explicitly highlights that it’s ad-free, lightweight, and has no paywalls—a refreshingly straightforward proposition in a market saturated with subscriptions.
This is a classic example of a sharp new developer tool that benefits end-users directly. The use of native code means compression is fast and doesn’t drain your battery. For anyone who regularly needs to shrink video files to send via messaging apps or email, this is a no-brainer. Its simplicity is its greatest strength; there are no complex editing features, just a focused solution to a common problem. It’s the kind of utility app that deserves to be a staple on many Android devices.
Prompty Town
This one stands out from the pack. Prompty Town is less of a traditional tool and more of a conceptual experiment. It’s a link directory where instead of just listing a URL, users “purchase” tiles and then use prompts to generate the buildings that represent their links. It’s a fascinating blend of digital real estate, generative AI, and social bookmarking.
The appeal is likely niche, targeting creators, marketers, or anyone fascinated by the intersection of AI and community spaces. The “purchase” mechanism is unclear—is it with real currency or an in-system points system? The free pricing suggests the latter. It’s hard to judge its immediate utility, as its value will be almost entirely dependent on the community that forms within it. Prompty Town feels like a prototype of a future web where interacting with links is a more creative and immersive experience. It might not solve a pressing daily problem, but it’s certainly one of the more imaginative launches of the day.
Quick Links
For more detailed information on any of these launches from February 2nd, you can check out their pages: