Perplexity just dropped Comet for iOS, claiming it's the first agentic AI browser for mobile. Let's dig into the features and see if it's actually worth the hype.
Tired of doomscrolling and context-switching between 50 Safari tabs on your iPhone? To cure this universal developer fatigue, the tech wizards just dropped a shiny new toy on Product Hunt: Comet for iOS. The team behind it flexes that it's the "first agentic AI browser built for mobile." Whenever I hear the word "agentic," my BS detector usually goes off, but considering the big brains at Perplexity are involved, let's see if this is a game-changer or just another wrapper with a massive marketing budget.
Long story short, Comet popped up on Product Hunt and quickly bagged over 100 upvotes. The pitch? It turns your mobile browser into an "actionable workspace." It doesn't just spit out generic ChatGPT answers; it actually does things across your tabs.
Here's the feature list that looks pretty damn impressive on paper:
If you look at the Product Hunt thread, it's mostly the usual "congrats on the launch!" circlejerk. But dig a little deeper into dev communities, and the crowd is completely split.
The hype-train passengers are loving the "mobile workspace" concept. Being able to chat with specific tabs is genuinely a killer feature that solves a massive mobile UX pain point.
However, the pragmatic senior devs (like yours truly) are squinting our eyes. First off, letting autonomous ai tools navigate tabs and potentially buy things is walking a privacy tightrope. What if the model hallucinates and decides to buy 10 mechanical keyboards on Amazon? Secondly, the performance. Running background agentic tasks on an iPhone sounds like a great way to drain your battery and hog your RAM like Google Chrome on steroids.
I'll admit, with Perplexity backing it, the underlying engine of Comet is probably solid. The shift towards browsers acting as "Agents" rather than just dumb windows is inevitable.
Survival tip for devs: Adopt the tech early so you don't become a dinosaur. The cross-tab summarization is a godsend when you're skimming through blog posts or StackOverflow threads on the go. But when it comes to the "actionable" part—like letting it fill out forms or handle payments—keep it on a tight leash. You don't want an AI going rogue and committing unreviewed code to prod... or draining your bank account.
Source: Product Hunt - Comet for iOS
