Think of Enqlave as a private archivist for your paperwork. You bring your documents together — statements, contracts, policies, medical records — and Enqlave reads across the whole library. Ask a question in plain language, and it answers, with every fact traced back to the source. This guide gets you there in a few minutes.
Two things get you started — a device and TestFlight — plus the invitation Daniel sends. The third card below is the one you can leave until later.
iPhone, iPad, or Mac running iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or macOS 26 (or newer). This is a firm requirement — earlier versions can't install the app. Check under Settings → General → About if you're unsure.
Apple's free app for trying pre-release software. If you don't have it yet, grab it from the App Store — we'll walk you through it in the next step.
Reading and filing are included during the beta, so you can start with no key at all. Your own free Gemini key is what switches on search by meaning, and what keeps analysis going once the included allowance runs out. Daniel will send you one, or you can mint your own at aistudio.google.com.
A note on the keys: they're yours alone. Treat them like a password — don't share them, and don't paste them anywhere but Enqlave. If you ever suspect a key has been exposed, tell Daniel. When the included allowance is spent, the Mac shows a banner above the file list — “Free AI analysis used up — add your free Gemini key in Settings → AI to keep going” — and that's your cue to paste one in.
Four taps and you're in. If you're testing on more than one device, repeat these on each — the same invitation works everywhere.
Tap Install, then open Enqlave when it's ready.
Sign in with Apple, point Enqlave at some paperwork, and it starts reading. There's nothing to paste to get going.
When you open Enqlave, sign in with Sign in with Apple. There's nothing to remember and no separate account to create.
Reading and filing are included during the beta — Enqlave supplies the key, so your first documents start being summarized and filed without any setup. The allowance is metered per account, and it's generous; when it runs out, the Mac says so plainly above the file list and points you to Settings → AI.
Your own free Gemini key, pasted in Settings → AI, is what switches on search by meaning — and on the Mac it also powers the prose answers and the AI category briefings, which the included allowance doesn't cover. On iPhone and iPad the allowance does cover answers. Either way, analysis needs your key once the allowance is spent. An Anthropic key is optional on top, there if you'd like to try Claude.
Where this is heading: the small routing steps behind a question are a good fit for Apple's on-device model, and that's the part we plan to move first. Reading whole documents — and the embeddings that power search by meaning — stay in the cloud for now; Apple ships no on-device equivalent for the latter at all.
Settings → AI · nothing to paste on day one; a key adds search by meaning.
If reading seems to stall, check the key first. On the Mac a banner above the file list tells you when the included allowance is spent. On iPhone and iPad there's no banner yet — analysis just goes quiet — so if documents stop getting summarized, look in Settings → AI.
Point Enqlave at your paperwork however suits you. On Mac, the easiest start is a folder of PDFs and images — Enqlave reads what's already there, sub-folders included, and picks up anything new you drop in later.
Other ways to add documents:
A note on formats: PDFs and images go straight in. Word, text, Markdown, RTF and HTML files are converted to PDF on import — but only when you hand them over deliberately. A .docx merely sitting in a watched folder is listed under Needs Attention with a one-click Convert & Import, so Enqlave never writes a file into your folder behind your back. PowerPoint and spreadsheet files, plus Keynote, Numbers and Pages, aren't supported yet.
Whichever you reach for, tell us: did anything fail to import, or get missed?
Drop a folder in once — new files are picked up on their own.
Enqlave files as it reads. Each document gets a plain-language summary, its key dates and dollar amounts pulled out, and a single home in one category. Most land somewhere sensible on their own; the ones Enqlave isn't confident about wait in Unfiled for you to place — and once you move a document yourself, that choice sticks, on every device, even when the document is re-read later.
Open the Scan tab, tap Start Scanning, and shoot as many pages as you like — they become one document. Three things worth knowing:
Pages are converted as you capture them, which keeps the saved PDF far smaller. The first time you open the tab you'll see a one-time card explaining it, with a Use Color button — or flip Black & White Scans in Settings whenever you like.
On the review screen, tap Add a note and use the keyboard's mic key — “this is the receipt for the boiler repair.” The note is searchable, and Enqlave reads it as context when it analyzes the document.
Scan on a plane and the document is committed to your phone the moment you tap Save — the save itself needs no connection, and the encrypted upload finishes on its own once you're back. One rough edge on today's build: launch the app cold with no signal and Save can stay greyed out for a minute while your sign-in is re-established. Tell us if you hit that.
Before you save, you can press and hold a page then drag to reorder it, or tap ✕ on a thumbnail to drop it. (A plain swipe just scrolls the strip.) Google Drive imports live in this tab too.
Paperwork turns up while your hands are full, so Enqlave puts scanning one press away — from the Lock Screen, the Home Screen, or Siri. These arrive with the TestFlight build that adds them: if you don't find Enqlave in the controls gallery yet, check TestFlight for an update.
What to expect from these. Pressing the control unlocks with Face ID first and, on a fresh launch, lands you on the scanner with the viewfinder already up. If a scan is still in review, a save is in flight, the camera is already open — or you've already saved a scan since Enqlave launched — it brings the app forward to the Scan tab instead, where Start Scanning is one tap away. Nothing in progress is ever discarded. And the widget deliberately shows no library data at all — it's a launcher, so nothing of yours renders on your Home or Lock Screen. If you haven't signed in yet, sign in and the gesture takes effect.
The Search tab is where Enqlave earns its keep. Two retrievers run side by side and their results are merged into one ranking — exact keyword matching, and matching by meaning. On top of those, it can answer in prose.
The obvious hits — the words that actually appear in your documents.
“bike” surfaces anything about bicycling; “car” finds documents about your Tesla even if the word never appears. Needs your Gemini key, plus documents that have already been indexed; without it, search quietly falls back to keyword matching. On iPhone and iPad, a search that comes back empty says so outright — “Smart search is off.”
Ask, and it answers from your library — e.g. “What's the EIN of Enqlave LLC?” — with the sources attached.
Ask the way you'd ask a person. Enqlave reads across everything, gives you one answer, and links the exact documents it drew from.
Watch for two things: did the answer cite its sources — and did it ever answer confidently but wrongly? That last one is the single most important thing to flag.
One answer, with the source document cited underneath.
Two things that make searching faster. On iPhone and iPad, the button at the top of the Search tab narrows results to a single category — the pill always names the active one, so search is never quietly filtered without your knowing, and a scoped no-results screen offers Search entire library. On the Mac you can run the whole loop from the keyboard: ⌘⌥F to focus the field, type, ↓ into the results, Return to open, Esc to clear. (Plain ⌘F searches inside the document you're looking at.)
Results now show the matched text itself, with your terms in bold, so you can see why something came back. Rows found purely by meaning have no highlighted passage — there are no matched words to show — and that's deliberate rather than a gap.
Every document lives in exactly one category in the left sidebar. Open a category and Enqlave doesn't just list what's inside — it summarizes and synthesizes the whole set to surface insights across it.
Think of it as a briefing on everything you've filed under, say, Insurance or Vehicles: what's here, what's changed, and what's worth your attention.
Is that useful to you? What did it reveal — or miss? We'd love to know.
A category becomes a synthesized briefing, not just a folder.
A category is the one place a document lives. A Smart Collection is a saved question about your library, so the same document can appear in several — and four come ready-made in the sidebar: Tax Documents, Insurance, Estate & Probate and Real Estate. They're deliberately broad, because missing a tax document costs more than seeing one too many.
You can build your own from keywords, tags, people, organizations, places and dates, or keep a plain manual one and drag documents in. Two behaviours are worth knowing: removing a document sticks — it won't drift back in the next time the rules run — and archived documents stay out of every collection. Edits sync, so a collection you tune on the Mac looks the same on your iPhone — with one exception during the beta: place-based rules only match on the Mac that read the documents, because locations aren't on the sync wire yet.
Does a ready-made collection hold something you'd never file there — or miss something obvious? Tell us which collection and which document; that's the feedback that tunes them.
Start simple. Add a handful of documents, then use Search to look something up — a document you want, or a detail plus what it belongs to. No question phrasing needed.
Type a word or two — say “VIN Multivan” — and Enqlave surfaces the right document and pulls the value straight out. It's the quickest way to feel how fast finding something becomes, and a natural warm-up before you move on to fuller, ask-anything questions.
Once that clicks, these are the newest corners and the ones we'd most like eyes on:
Rows under Key Dates and Upcoming Travel swipe now: left for Dismiss, right for Snooze 1 Day (long-press still holds a week). Dismissals follow you to your other devices.
Tap the sync badge on Home for the Sync panel, led by an In the Cloud card: how many documents are up, how many are waiting, how much room they take. The stat chips on Home are tappable too.
The Mac now opens on Overview rather than wherever you left off. ⌘⇧D finds duplicate files, and the new Help menu holds the keyboard shortcuts, Run Health Check and Send Feedback….
From there, Enqlave rewards four broad kinds of questions. The best test, though, is whatever you'd genuinely want to know about your own papers.
Themes and summaries drawn across everything at once.
Questions whose answer lives in several documents, not one.
Totals and aggregations pulled from your statements.
Finding one specific figure, contract, or document, fast.
Does it feel safe, dependable, and delightful? That's the bar we're holding ourselves to. Tell us where it clears it — and where it falls short.
Please be candid — this is exactly the stage where honest reactions are most valuable. Candid beats polite, especially bug reports and “this confused me” moments.
Use Send Feedback inside the app: on iPhone and iPad it's in Settings → Feedback; on the Mac it's in the new Help menu (Send Feedback…) or Settings → Support. It opens a short note to us and attaches recent diagnostic logs. You're also welcome to write directly to beta@enclave-ai.com.
A few things are especially worth reporting:
What those logs contain: counts, durations and status codes — plus, on iPhone and iPad, crash and performance reports from iOS. Never the content of a document, never a filename, never your search text. The background diagnostics stream is on by default and reversible — the “Share diagnostics with developer” switch in Settings takes effect immediately. A feedback message you choose to send always carries a recent log excerpt, which is the point of sending it.
Your documents are encrypted on your device (AES-256-GCM, with keys wrapped for each device using hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-768 — so breaking it would mean breaking both, one of them post-quantum) before they ever sync, and stay under your control. We operate the cloud that keeps your library in step across devices — but it only ever holds data we cannot read.
This is an early beta — you'll meet some rough edges. That's the point of your being here.
Enqlave is designed to hold up to around 10,000 documents per person — though we haven't yet tested beyond 2,000 documents, so that's where the well-trodden path ends for now. If you push past it, we'd love to hear how it holds up.
PowerPoint and spreadsheet files, plus Keynote, Numbers and Pages, aren't accepted yet. We haven't found an offline converter that renders them faithfully, and converting them on our servers would break the promise that we can't read your documents — so for now Enqlave declines them rather than mangling them.
A PDF over about 50 MB is still stored, synced and searchable, but the AI can't look at its pages — Enqlave falls back to whatever text is already inside the file. For a text-based PDF that's plenty. A giant scanned one gets no summary at all — it's marked failed with “PDF is too large and appears to be scanned”, because reading it page-by-page as images isn't built yet.
Both are built from the dates and places the AI pulled out of your documents, so they fill in as more of your library is read — and Map is on Mac and iPad only; there's no Map on iPhone yet. Expect gaps.
Only the Mac watches a folder and picks up new files by itself. On iPhone and iPad, documents arrive by sync from your other devices, or because you scanned, shared or imported them — never by watching a folder.
We're grateful you're spending time with Enqlave this early — your notes shape what it becomes. If anything at all is unclear, during setup or after, reach Daniel directly and he'll help.
Email the team