bin

iPhone & Apple Watch

The iPhone app is the highest-value way to capture. From anywhere in iOS, send a link, a photo, a screenshot, selected text, or a voice memo straight into bin in one tap. The Apple Watch app captures from your wrist without your phone in hand.

Install

The app is in TestFlight while bin is in early access.

  1. Install Apple’s TestFlight app from the App Store.
  2. Open your bin TestFlight invite link and tap Install.
  3. Launch bin and claim your invite, or sign in with your email if you already have an account. The app sets itself up; there is nothing to configure.

The watch app installs alongside the phone app and pairs itself.

Capture from the share sheet

Once you are in, bin appears in the iOS share sheet across the system.

  1. In any app, tap Share.
  2. Choose bin.
  3. The item lands in your inbox, timestamped, immediately.

You can share:

  • A link or selected text — saved the moment the sheet opens. A note field then opens with the keyboard up. Type why you saved it and tap Save, or tap Skip to keep just the link. Skip asks first before it throws away words you typed. A note made offline stays on the phone and goes up when you are back online.
  • Photos and screenshots — up to six at once. Each becomes its own item, and a note you type applies to all of them.
  • A voice memo — an audio file from Voice Memos goes onto the same transcription pipeline as an in-app recording.

The note is optional, and there is nothing else to fill in. Deciding what each item means happens later, when you triage.

In the app, a shared link with a note is titled by your note, with the site underneath. The item screen shows the note in its own section. Notes are searchable by meaning. Agents read the note too: while the share sheet is open, the link is held back from them (for five minutes at most), so an agent never handles the bare link while you are still typing what it is for.

Photos read themselves

A photo is a first-class capture, not an attachment. When you capture one, your phone reads the text in it on-device with Apple’s Vision framework and sends that along with the image. The words on a receipt, a whiteboard, a business card, or a parking sign are searchable the moment the item lands — and your agents can act on them over the API.

The reading happens on your device. The image is never sent anywhere to be analyzed.

Text recognition runs with language correction off on purpose. What people photograph is part numbers, prices, wifi passwords and serials, and “correcting” those is how a captured code stops matching the thing it identifies.

From inside the app

Tap the camera button on the Add screen to either:

  • Scan a document — multi-page, deskewed, straightened.
  • Pick from your library — the picker runs outside the app, so bin never asks for photo-library permission and never sees a photo you did not choose.

Add a note by typing it, or record one by voice and let it transcribe.

Capture by voice

Tap record on the Add screen and talk. The words appear as you speak — the phone transcribes on-device, live — and the recording uploads in the background, is transcribed again on the server, and the final text lands on the item. You can close the app while it uploads; recording also survives the phone locking.

A recording cannot run away. Every recording is capped at five minutes, and the cap holds even while the app is suspended and the screen is dark. On top of that: a haptic at each full minute, a “Still recording — tap to stop” notification if it is running two minutes after you leave the app, and end-of-speech detection that asks “Finished?” after twelve seconds of silence and stops and saves at twenty. The watch buzzes each minute and carries the same five-minute cap.

If a transcription fails, the item is held back from your normal queue rather than shown as an empty note — see the sweep guidance in API & agents.

Capture from your wrist

The watch app is the fastest path from thought to inbox: raise your wrist, tap, and speak. The recording uploads from the watch directly, so a capture is not waiting on your phone to be nearby or the app to be opened. Add the complication to your watch face to make it one tap from anywhere.

The capture button

Add the bin home-screen icon or use the in-app + to capture a note without leaving the app. It goes to the same inbox as everything else.

Everything you captured, in one tab

The app has two tabs: Add, where you capture, and History, which holds every item you have ever captured — whatever state it is in, and whatever an agent has since done with it. Each row carries where it got to (uploading, transcribing, transcribed, failed) with Retry on the ones that failed. Search from the field at the top, swipe a row to delete it for good, or tap through to see that item’s full activity trail.

Empty inbox is the goal

An empty queue is success, not a dead end. Capture freely during the day, then work it down (yourself or with an agent) until it is clear again.