HiFAi

The podcast app that removes the ads

iPhone · iOS 26 Free In TestFlight

A podcast app that downloads each episode, finds the ads on your phone, and skips them. The ads are gone before you press play.

A clean, dark podcast player. Episodes download in full, HiFAi finds the inserted ads right on your iPhone, and they’re skipped automatically. No account, no tracking, no streaming.

Support → Privacy policy →

HiFAi player with ad breaks marked on the timeline — **Player**Ad breaks marked and skipped

HiFAi podcasts list — **Podcasts**Your shows, with unplayed counts

A show page in HiFAi showing ads removed — **Show page**“Ads removed · 6 cut · 2:53”

HiFAi episodes play queue — **Episodes**Your play queue, with live status

HiFAi ads tab listing every cut — **Ads tab**Every cut, playable, Ad / Not Ad

HiFAi search screen — **Search**A plain search box, no charts

HiFAi settings screen — **Settings**How it works, in plain English

How it finds the adsTwo signals, combined, all on your iPhone

Two signals, combined, all on your iPhone

Nothing is uploaded and the audio never leaves the phone. No AI, no voice recognition and no transcripts: just audio fingerprints, so it’s fast, private and predictable.

Repeated audio

Anything that plays more than once across a show’s latest 5 episodes, or twice in the same one, is an ad. Show audio is unique; ads repeat.

Version check

The episode is fetched twice more as differently named apps. Ad servers fill the breaks differently each time, so anything missing from the other copies is an ad. The extra copies are deleted right after.

98–99%

of ad time removed on a tested episode with a known ad-free version, with only seconds of show audio touched. Ads less than 2 minutes apart are cut as one break, so nothing slips through in between.

FeaturesEverything it does, at a glance

You stay in control

Mark Ad: one tap if something slips through; HiFAi finds where it starts and ends
Ad database: every ad you mark is cut from every future episode, on any show
Ads tab: listen to anything cut and answer Ad / Not an ad

Player

Ad breaks shown right on the timeline
Mark Ad · −10 · Play · +30 · Played
Lock screen controls, per-show speed, skip intro, sleep timer

Library

Episodes tab is your play order: hold and drag to reorder
New shows download their 5 latest episodes automatically
Search, paste a feed link, or import OPML from another app
Your podcast list is backed up to iCloud Keychain

Built to be light

The whole app is about 1.5 MB
One job at a time, at low priority, so playback and scrolling stay smooth
Artwork cached small: 5–25 KB instead of several MB

Private

No account, no tracking, no ads of its own
No AI: ads are found with audio fingerprints alone
Optional “Help improve ad detection” shares only anonymous fingerprints and times, never audio

Behind the scenesThe Mac test bench

The Mac test bench

To design the ad detection, we built a separate Mac app to test strategies on real episodes first. Every idea (repeats, version checks, ad lengths, gap rules) was scored against real, human-checked ads before it shipped to the phone.

Mac test bench showing one episode with numbered ads — One episode, with its numbered ads and a whole-episode player

Mac test bench showing every ad found across a show — Every ad found across a show

iPhone

Swift, SwiftUI, SwiftData, AVFoundation and background downloads.

Ad detection

Spectral fingerprints every 20 ms, matched across episodes and copies; edges snapped to the splice points.

Mac test bench

A Swift scanner using the app’s own detector, plus a small local web app.

Optional server

Python and SQLite on a small cloud server. Anonymous fingerprints only.

Status: in TestFlight (build 27, November 2026), not yet on the App Store. Ads the hosts read themselves, live in the show, aren’t detected automatically; Mark Ad handles those.