Simple Chat Hub launches desktop client as meow open-sources iOS proxy client

Two developer projects surfaced on the V2EX community on Nov 9, 2026: multi-AI side-by-side comparison tool Simple Chat Hub released Windows, macOS and Linux desktop clients; proxy client meow announced that its iOS app is fully open source from UI to kernel, with an Android version also available.

Simple Chat Hub: desktop client closes the extension gap

Simple Chat Hub places the web versions of AI platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Doubao and Kimi side by side in one window. Through a unified input bar, users send the same question to multiple platforms to compare answers side by side. The project says it supports 30+ major international and Chinese AI platforms out of the box, plus arbitrary layouts, space switching, session saving, prompt recall/optimization and long screenshots.

According to the author, the client was rebuilt over a month of human-AI collaboration. The desktop version sidesteps the limits of the browser extension: Grok and Mimo, which do not work properly in the extension, can now be opened and chatted with in the desktop app.

meow: full-stack open source for an iOS proxy client

meow is a proxy client for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, with an Android version as well. The project notes that most iOS proxy clients are closed source, with code running in the Network Extension invisible to users; meow open-sources everything from the SwiftUI interface, Network Extension and tun2socks down to the proxy kernel under the MIT license, so users can audit or compile it themselves. The iOS app, the meow-rs kernel and the Android version are hosted under the meow-rs organization on GitHub.

iOS kills a Network Extension process once it holds more than about 50 MB of resident memory. The earliest Go kernel plus the Go runtime took up most of that, leaving no headroom once traffic picked up.

On the kernel side, meow-rs is a mihomo (Clash Meta)-compatible kernel written in Rust, and it runs on iOS, Android, desktop and routers. The project explains that switching to pure Rust turned the kernel into a static library, with all TLS going through a single BoringSSL (including Hysteria2's QUIC), no GC, and both memory use and binary size pushed down.

On features, meow supports protocols including Shadowsocks, Trojan, VLESS (XTLS-Vision, REALITY), VMess, Hysteria2, AnyTLS, Snell and HTTP/SOCKS5, with transport layers WS, gRPC, H2, HTTPUpgrade and XHTTP; it supports mihomo rules (DOMAIN/IP-CIDR/GEOIP/GEOSITE/RULE-SET and others), proxy groups select/url-test/fallback/load-balance/relay and dialer-proxy chained proxies; subscriptions can auto-update daily or weekly, and a built-in YAML editor is included. On Apple TV, configurations can be sent from an iPhone via iCloud; home screen, lock screen and Control Center widgets can toggle the VPN and switch between rule/global/direct modes; iPad and foldables get a two-column layout.

On privacy, the app collects no data — subscriptions, configurations, DNS queries and traffic all stay on the device; it does not provide nodes, so users must bring their own Clash/mihomo subscription.

What to watch

Both projects ship as open-source or public code repositories, and their future iterations, platform support and user feedback are worth following. The signing issue for Simple Chat Hub's Windows/macOS builds and meow's progress on protocols such as TUIC and Mieru are likely areas of interest for technical users.