Comet is now on iOS. Perplexity’s AI browser, which debuted on desktop last summer at a price that made most people do a double-take, is now free on mobile, with optional paid tiers starting at $20 a month. It was supposed to launch on March 11.
The team pushed it back a week. It went live yesterday.
Here is what it actually is. Comet blends a traditional browser with an AI assistant that can summarize pages, answer questions, and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf. The agentic approach, where the AI does not just respond but actively navigates, clicks, and completes actions, has become the defining feature in what is now a crowded field of AI-enhanced browsers.
The practical features on iOS are worth knowing. The browser delivers standard search results for simple, high-intent mobile queries like scores, local businesses, and directions, while routing more complex questions to Perplexity’s answer engine for researched, cited responses. Deep Research, Perplexity’s multi-source synthesis tool, is fully available on the mobile version. Research threads sync across desktop and mobile, so users can start a task on their laptop and pick it up on their phone without losing context. Voice mode is in. Extensions are not, due to Apple’s platform restrictions.
The app takes full advantage of Apple’s Liquid Glass design language, and it can be set as the default browser. No iPad version yet.
A few things worth knowing before you download.
Every iOS browser is required to run on WebKit, the same engine that powers Safari. So Comet cannot compete on raw rendering performance. What it is betting on is everything that happens after the page loads. That is a legitimate product bet, and it is the right one for what Perplexity is trying to build.
Perplexity collects browsing and search history from Comet to build ad-targeting profiles. That is not buried in the terms. The company has been transparent about it. But it does reframe what free means here. A browser with access to your tabs, your emails, your shopping, your calendar, and your research threads is a fairly intimate instrument. The trade being offered is convenience in exchange for a detailed behavioral profile. That is a trade people make every day, knowingly and not. It is just worth naming clearly when the product is positioned as a thinking partner.
Perplexity is reportedly in discussions with smartphone manufacturers about pre-installing Comet on upcoming devices. If that happens, the distribution story changes considerably. A browser that ships pre-installed does not need to win you over in the App Store. It just needs to be good enough that you do not switch away.
The browser category has not seen genuine disruption since Chrome dethroned Internet Explorer fifteen years ago. What Comet, Chrome’s Gemini integration, and OpenAI’s Atlas browser are all pointing toward is that the next version of that disruption is not about speed or standards compliance. It is about what the browser does when you are not actively driving it.
That is a different kind of browser. Whether it is one people actually want is the question this launch begins to answer.
