Perplexity's Comet Browser Lands on iPhone—Free

Perplexity’s Comet browser is on the App Store as of March 18, free to download on iPhone and iPad. The pricing gap from launch is striking: Comet debuted on desktop at $200 per month, reserved for Max subscribers. The iOS version is available to anyone, with Pro ($20/month) and Max tiers unlocking the full agentic feature set.

The core experience: Comet replaces standard browsing with a conversational layer. Ask it to compare prices across shopping tabs, summarize an open PDF, or draft a reply to an email showing on screen—it does it without requiring you to copy text or switch apps. Deep Research, which aggregates and synthesizes information from multiple web sources, is available natively. Voice mode works throughout.

What’s missing on iOS compared to desktop is browser extension support. Apple’s WebKit restrictions and App Store policies limit what third-party browsers can do on iPhone, so Comet on iOS is fundamentally the Perplexity AI assistant wrapped around a browsing UI rather than a full extension ecosystem. For most use cases that matters less than the perception—people picking a default browser on iPhone are not extension-heavy power users.

The launch is one week late. The team originally targeted March 11, then pushed it without specific explanation. Given that Android shipped in November 2025, the gap to iOS has been longer than typical for a company at Perplexity’s funding level. CEO Aravind Srinivas has been explicit that Comet is a core bet, not a side product—it’s one half of a two-product strategy alongside the search engine.

The other half is Personal Computer, Perplexity’s cloud agent that runs persistently on a dedicated Mac mini and handles background tasks with full file system access. That launched March 12 at $200/month, Max-only. Together, Comet and Personal Computer mark a deliberate pivot from search product to ambient AI platform.

On iPhone, the browser market is where this gets interesting. Safari has a structural advantage with system integration. Chrome has habit. Perplexity’s argument is that neither of those browsers actively helps you do things—they just navigate. Whether that’s a compelling enough differentiator for users to switch default browsers remains the open question.