Brief reads your iMessages on your Mac, finds the things you actually need to act on — appointments, tasks, payments, follow-ups — and lines them up on your iPhone for a quick review. Plus a tight morning brief.
Your Mac does the reading. Your iPhone is mission control.
The Brief menu-bar app reads your Messages on a schedule and surfaces only the genuinely actionable stuff — not "haha" and "on my way."
A clean, prioritized queue. Each item is summarized in plain language, color-coded Work or Personal, with the date and time already pulled out.
Tap a card for a pre-filled draft — title, date, notes — edit anything, then add it straight to Apple Reminders or Calendar.
Smart filtering means only real action items show up. Swipe, draft, done.
Weather, your day, the news that matters to you, your teams' scores, and your overnight message catch-up — in one tight briefing.
Brief reads your messages on your own devices. The full text never leaves your Mac — only short excerpts sync so you can review on your phone.
Start free. Upgrade when you want the live brief.
or $59.99 / year
It reads them on your own Mac to find action items. The full text never leaves your device — only short excerpts and your routing decisions sync so you can review on your iPhone. We never sell your data or use it to train models.
macOS protects your Messages database behind a permission called Full Disk Access. You grant it to the Brief Mac app once, in System Settings → Privacy & Security. It's the only way any app can read Messages — and it stays on your machine.
You need a Mac (for the scanning) and an iPhone (for reviewing). The Mac app is a small menu-bar utility; the iPhone app is where you review and route.
Free for the queue, 100 actioned items a month, and the basic daily brief. Premium is $6.99/month or $59.99/year for unlimited items and the live web brief.
Not yet — Brief reads iMessage on macOS today. Tell us what you need on the waitlist.
Join the waitlist and we'll let you know the moment Brief is ready.
Loved by people drowning in texts
Reviews coming soon — Brief is in early access.