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Comet for iPhone landed on the App Store on March 18, one week later than originally planned, and Perplexity's marketing describes it as a personal assistant that learns how you think and automates the web on your behalf. That framing is appealing. It is also incomplete. Before switching browsers, there are three things the announcement coverage mostly skipped: a hard platform constraint that reshapes what Comet can actually deliver, a privacy model with two faces, and a competitive picture that looks different once you know where the gaps are.
Apple's WebKit mandate, which forces every third-party iPhone browser onto the same rendering engine as Safari, should be the first thing anyone reads about Comet for iOS. It means the browser cannot compete on speed or rendering at all, and Perplexity knows it.
This is not a criticism of Perplexity's engineering. It is how Apple's App Store rules work for every browser on the platform. Chrome for iPhone, Firefox for iPhone, Edge for iPhone: they all run on WebKit. gHacks confirmed that because of this constraint, Comet cannot stand out on rendering speed or performance. The WebKit engine is the same one powering Safari, which means, in our reading of the platform constraint, Perplexity chose to lean into this reality rather than fight it. Every differentiator Comet offers operates above the rendering layer, on top of whatever a page would have loaded in Safari anyway.
That forced focus is, paradoxically, what makes the product coherent. A browser that must compete entirely on what happens after a page loads has to build something genuinely useful at that layer or it has no reason to exist. Comet's entire bet is on the AI assistant that rides on top of standard WebKit browsing.
Setting Comet as your default browser changes where tap-to-open links go in your browser, but in-app web views inside third-party apps still open through Safari's native View Controller rather than Comet. That distinction matters for users who expect "default browser" to mean a system-wide switch. It does not, on iOS.
The Comet Assistant is the core of the product. From the address bar, a central button opens a conversational interface where users can ask questions about whatever tab is currently open, compare information across multiple open tabs, or hand off multi-step tasks to the browser agent. A voice mode is built in natively, powered by the OpenAI realtime voice API for agents, which means spoken questions about the current page trigger live responses rather than pre-built shortcuts.
Deep Research is available on mobile. When activated, the assistant scans multiple web sources, synthesizes the findings, and returns a cited summary rather than a list of links. Cross-device continuity is a genuine feature: research threads started on a Mac or Android device carry over to iPhone through the Comet sync chain.
The sync mechanism has a practical friction point worth noting. Rather than logging into a Perplexity account on each device, users must enter a code displayed on a primary device into a secondary device to establish the sync chain. MacStories, which tested the app for three weeks before launch, described this process as "weird and clunky" compared to how Chrome handles multi-device sync through simple account login.
The browser itself downloads free. The ad blocker is free. Basic AI-assisted search and the Comet Assistant are free at the base level. Comet Plus, at $5 per month, unlocks premium publisher content from media partners. Pro, at $20 per month, adds unlimited Pro searches, access to more advanced AI models, and priority queue access; Max, at $200 per month, brings the Max Assistant, which runs on higher-reasoning models and has access to Labs features before general release.
There are no extensions. iOS sandboxing rules make browser extensions impossible for any third-party browser, not just Comet. How much of the overall feature set matters in practice depends on which tier a user is willing to pay for; the free tier is better understood, in our assessment, as an entry point than as a complete product.
Perplexity's official Comet Data Privacy FAQ states that "Comet does not and will not sell your data." Tuta's analysis, citing a TBPN podcast interview with CEO Aravind Srinivas, documented him stating that one motivation for building Comet was to "get data even outside the app to better understand you" and to support ad-targeting in Perplexity's Discover feed.
Perplexity's privacy FAQ assurance and its CEO's openly stated rationale for building a browser are both true at the same time, and no single piece of launch coverage placed them side by side — which is precisely where the transparency gap lives.
Perplexity's position is technically defensible. Collecting data to build internal ad profiles is not the same as selling that data to third parties. But the gap between the FAQ's reassurance and the CEO's stated motivation deserves direct acknowledgment before users hand over their full browsing history.
The Comet Privacy Notice specifies that technical data, including device hardware information, is collected even in Incognito Mode. Browsing Data, which includes URLs visited, page text and images, cookies, and search queries, travels to Perplexity's servers when a user invokes an agentic action, such as asking the assistant to book a restaurant or research a contact. By default, this data stays on the device for passive browsing. The moment an agent is invoked, the context needed to complete the task is transmitted.
Gmail and Calendar integrations are strictly opt-in, and users can revoke access at any time. Cloud sync of browsing history is also opt-in. The privacy model is more nuanced than critics allow and less transparent than the FAQ implies. What is not nuanced is the business logic: the free iOS launch expands the pool of users feeding Perplexity's ad-targeting infrastructure, which is consistent with exactly what the CEO described as the reason to build the browser.
eWeek found that Chrome for iOS's recently added Gemini integration cannot complete multi-step tasks on a user's behalf, handling only single-step queries. Microsoft Edge's Copilot Mode remains desktop-only. Task reliability in controlled testing reached approximately 75% for Comet, the highest among AI browsers tested, though real-world mobile performance may vary from those benchmarks.
Testing across AI browsers by Kahana found that every browser in the category failed at least 20% of agentic tasks, with shopping automation most prone to errors. Comet was the most consistent performer but not an exception to the overall immaturity of the category. Watching the browser complete a multi-step task is often slower than completing the task manually, particularly for actions that require navigating forms or comparing prices across multiple sites. The mobile AI browser race is also shifting on Android: Samsung Browser's One UI 9 update gives it an on-device AI edge that Chrome on Android currently lacks, a parallel development worth watching for anyone tracking where mobile browser AI is heading.
ChatGPT Atlas requires a paid ChatGPT Plus subscription to unlock agent mode, where Comet's agentic features are available on the free tier. For a user who does not already pay for ChatGPT Plus, Comet is the lowest-cost entry point to mobile agentic browsing right now.
Chrome for iOS cannot complete multi-step agentic tasks. Edge's Copilot Mode is desktop-only. ChatGPT Atlas requires a paid subscription for agent access. Comet is the only free iOS browser completing multi-step tasks. The lead exists because competitors have not yet prioritized mobile agentic, not because Comet's underlying engine is categorically ahead. That distinction matters for anyone evaluating whether to invest time in the setup and privacy trade-offs: the gap is real today and likely to narrow.
Download Comet if: You already use Perplexity's search engine and trust its answer quality. You do research-heavy mobile work and want cited summaries without switching apps. You want to try agentic browsing without paying for a ChatGPT Plus subscription. You are already running Comet on a Mac or Android device and want cross-device continuity.
Skip it for now if: Privacy is a meaningful concern and the CEO's stated data-collection goals conflict with your tolerance. You rely on browser extensions for productivity and assumed a new browser would support them. You are a casual iPhone browser looking to "try AI" through a new app. You are evaluating it for enterprise use, where Gartner has recommended blocking AI browsers due to prompt injection risk.
Yes, Comet can be set as the default browser in iOS Settings, which redirects links tapped outside apps to Comet. The limitation is that in-app web views, the browser windows that open inside third-party apps when you tap a link within them, continue to use Safari's native View Controller rather than Comet. Setting Comet as default changes behavior for standalone links; it does not make Comet the system-wide browser for all contexts.
An iPad version was released alongside the iPhone version on March 18, though it was not part of the pre-launch TestFlight build that reviewers tested. Perplexity has not announced a separate iPadOS-optimized experience with different layouts or features; the current iPad version uses the same codebase as the iPhone app. Perplexity has a track record of building purpose-built iPadOS experiences, which makes a native iPad-specific version more plausible than the absence of one at launch might suggest, though no development timeline has been confirmed.
No, and this is not a Comet-specific limitation. Apple's iOS sandboxing rules prohibit third-party browsers from supporting extensions, which is why Chrome, Firefox, and Edge on iPhone also have no extension support. Any browser extension workflow you rely on in desktop Safari or desktop Chrome is unavailable on any iPhone browser, Comet included.
Comet uses a "sync chain" model rather than simple account-based sync. To add a new device to the chain, you select that device as a target within the Comet interface on your primary device, which displays a code. You then enter that code on the secondary device. Bookmarks, browsing history, and account data sync across devices once the chain is established. The process works but is more involved than signing into a browser account, which is how Chrome and Safari handle multi-device sync.