Installing takes two steps: the app (123 MB), then a one-time download of the model and library inside the app (about 1 GB). That download is the only time BOAR needs the internet. After it, airplane mode is fine.
What you need
- A 64-bit ARM Android phone. That's almost every Android phone from the last several years.
- About 1.2 GB free for the default setup, or about 1.4 GB with the large Wikipedia pack. Bigger optional models need 2–5 GB each.
- Wi-Fi or data once, for the setup download.
BOAR is tested on a Xiaomi 2311DRK48G (MediaTek Dimensity 8300, 11.6 GB RAM, Android 16). The default model peaked at 1.8–3.1 GB of memory there, so phones with less RAM should run it too; bigger models need more.
1. Download the APK
Get boar-v1.0.0-arm64.apk from the latest release on GitHub.
2. Check it (optional, recommended)
The release publishes a SHA-256 checksum next to the APK. On a computer, with both files in the same folder:
sha256sum -c boar-v1.0.0-arm64.apk.sha256
# boar-v1.0.0-arm64.apk: OKOn macOS, shasum -a 256 -c boar-v1.0.0-arm64.apk.sha256 does the same.
3. Install it
- On the phone: open the APK from your downloads. Android asks you to allow installs from that app (your browser or file manager) the first time.
- From a computer: with USB debugging on,
adb install boar-v1.0.0-arm64.apk. - Guided: clone the repo and run
make setup, then pick "Install BOAR on my phone". It downloads the release, checks the checksum and installs over USB.
4. The one-time setup
Open BOAR while you're online. The setup wizard asks for a language (English or Portuguese, for the menus), checks your phone's memory and storage, and offers four setups. They all download the same model; they differ in how much of the library comes with it.
| Setup | Library | Extra download |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum | 300 built-in topics | none |
| Standard | + 1,000 Wikipedia-derived topics | ~600 KB |
| Full | 5,300 topics in total | ~3 MB |
| Encyclopedia | Full + the introductions of Wikipedia's ~50,000 Vital Articles | ~164 MB |
Every setup downloads:
- Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, the model that writes the answers (about 0.99 GB, Apache-2.0).
- bge-small-en-v1.5, a small model that finds passages by meaning (about 35 MB, MIT).
Each download shows its progress and gets a Retry button if it stalls. When they finish, Continue opens the chat.
5. Go offline
Turn on airplane mode and ask something. The OFFLINE badge in the header is real: from here on, answering uses only the phone.
You can change your setup later from Settings → App → Re-run Setup Wizard, without losing your conversations or documents.
Next
- Ask and check: how answers and sources work.
- Knowledge packs: add more to the library.
- Something went wrong? Troubleshooting.