On a plane, in a secure office, with no connection — every feature works exactly the same. Not because there is an offline mode, but because the AI models run directly on your iPhone. No cloud. No uploads. No accounts.
Most marketing treats them as one promise. They aren't — and the reason they're worth separating is that each one is evidence for the other.
This page is mostly the second argument. If you can't risk a photo crossing a network, "it also works offline" is the cheapest way to check whether anyone is telling you the truth about where your images go — and it's the property that makes the app usable in rooms where no cloud tool is permitted in the first place.
Each row below is a documented capability of the app, not a category. The middle column is the honest answer for any tool with a server round-trip in its pipeline.
| Workflow step | Any tool with a server round-trip | Cutano, connection off |
|---|---|---|
| Subject segmentation | Blocked until a response arrives | Core ML on-device, same model |
| Switching matting models, re-matting in place | Each pass is another request | Portrait / general / edge-refined, local |
| Edge contraction & feathering | Re-applied server-side, per round-trip | Live sliders, Metal GPU refinement |
| Erase / restore brushes and undo | Refinement depends on connectivity | Non-destructive, atomic undo |
| Layers: reorder, select, delete | Often needs a synced document | Unified text + image layer model |
| Adding and styling text | Remote editor, remote render | Colour, opacity, size, font on-device |
| Contact shadow & floor reflection | Rendered off the phone | Metal-rendered, real time |
| Crop, smart crop, canvas presets | Re-encoded on a server | Custom sizes plus 1:1 / 9:16 / 16:9 |
| Batch-processing an album | Queue waits for a connection | Tiered scheduling, per-item retry |
| Export at original resolution | Downloaded back after processing | Full-resolution replay on Pro, up to 8192px |
| Saving results to your library | Fetch, then save | Straight from the device |
One clarification, stated precisely: there is no "offline mode" to switch on. The app doesn't need a connection for the work, so there is nothing to enable and no degraded path to fall into. What you see with signal is what you get without it.
Not people who dislike slow uploads. People for whom the upload is the problem.
Seatback work on a long flight: cull a shoot, cut out the keepers, export what you'll need the moment you land. Nothing is paused waiting for a ground network.
Rooms where phones get no cellular or Wi-Fi, and where no cloud service is permitted regardless. The requirement isn't convenience — an approved tool must not have a network path.
Sites, roads, forests, venues. A product shot or a document capture with nothing usable to send it to, and a deadline that doesn't move for a spinner.
Anywhere the connection is intermittent rather than absent. With a server pipeline you get partial results; with local inference you get the same result in a different amount of time.
A client's unreleased product, a patient-adjacent document, a vendor's catalogue shot. Sometimes the rule is simply that this file does not cross a network, and the conversation ends there.
No account to open, no terms to reread, no reason to trust a retention policy. The cleanest privacy position is the one where the copy never exists elsewhere.
Two things, and neither of them is the editing. Listing them is part of the point: an app that admits this is an app whose offline claim you can believe.
There is no Cutano account to sign in to, which is why the airplane-mode answer is so much simpler than it usually is. Payments are handled natively through StoreKit 2 rather than a service of ours, so the only account in the loop is the one Apple already runs on your phone.
Offline support reads like a nice extra in most photo apps. Here it's a side effect of a decision made earlier: the thing that does the work travels inside the app.
A multi-model Core ML engine — BiRefNet-class on-device segmentation in multiple quality tiers — runs directly on your iPhone. If the model is on the phone, the photo has nowhere to go.
Metal GPU acceleration handles mask refinement, shadows and reflections on the device's own GPU. Post-processing is the half that usually gets pushed to a server; it isn't here.
Full-resolution layer replay on Pro means exporting at up to 8192px is a rendering job on your hardware, matching the preview pixel-for-pixel — not a file handed back to you.
The trade is honest: models that size make the app bigger than a thin client to a server would be, and their ceiling is what your iPhone can compute. The gain is that no outage, no captive portal and no policy memo can interrupt the work.
Running locally means the constraint is compute time rather than bandwidth — and that's a problem the app tiers for. iPhone with iOS 17 or later is the requirement.
The claim worth making is the architectural one. Anything stronger than that is a promise nobody can audit, so it isn't made here.
Stated as an absence of plumbing: there is no path in the app that sends an image anywhere.
On a plane, in a secure office, with no connection — every feature works exactly the same.
Nothing to register, nothing to verify, and no profile that could hold a copy of your work.
Privacy isn't a paid feature — it's the architecture. Free users and subscribers enjoy the exact same data isolation.
Free on the App Store. No account, no analytics SDKs, and no upload path for images anywhere in the app.
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