Two years ago, adding AI to your app meant only cloud APIs — sending data to servers, paying per request, hoping for good internet. That world is ending.

Today, you can run SLM directly on a phone. No internet, no per-request costs, data never leaves the device. This is production-ready technology.

I built flutter_gemma, an open-source plugin for running AI models locally on iOS, Android, and Web. I'll share what I've learned—not marketing, but real trade-offs and opportunities.

What's possible now — Running Gemma 3 on smartphones, the hardware that enables it, formats that matter (.task, .litertlm). What changes for developers — Offline-first AI, hybrid cloud/edge patterns, model size decisions, fine-tuning and optimization skills.

Where we're heading — Multimodal on-device models, function calling, on-device fine-tuning, edge-specific models like Gemma 3n.

The future isn't replacing cloud — it's a new option: private, fast, and works anywhere.