rewind ai vs recall: how the two screen memory apps compare in 2026

rewind ai vs recall is less a contest than a platform split. rewind was a mac app that recorded your screen and audio and kept the archive on your mac, and it stopped capturing on december 19, 2025. microsoft recall saves encrypted snapshots on copilot+ windows pcs, and as of october 2026 it is still shipping, still labelled preview.

on windows with the right hardware, recall is the live option. on a mac, neither one is, so settling rewind vs microsoft recall there means picking a third app.

how did rewind and recall capture your screen?

both sampled your screen as stills. rewind's help center said it captured a frame every two seconds and compressed them into a recording. it captured audio too. recall saves snapshots and, in the pages we read, no audio.

rewind's homepage, archived in june 2024, said it ran "imperceptibly in the background capturing your screen and audio." it compressed, transcribed and encrypted that recording, then stored it on the mac. meeting transcription ran locally too. ask rewind answered questions from the archive, and rewind said only relevant text went to its llm partners when you used it.

recall saves a still for each moment. microsoft's recall support page says a snapshot of your active screen is saved every few seconds and whenever the content of the active window changes. recall indexes the text and images, so you can describe what you remember instead of matching exact words.

per microsoft's admin documentation, no internet connection is used to save or analyse snapshots. none of the recall pages we read describe audio capture.

what hardware does microsoft recall need?

recall needs a copilot+ pc, and most windows machines are not one. microsoft lists this minimum:

• a copilot+ pc that meets the secured core standard
• an npu rated at 40 tops
• 16 gb of ram and 8 logical processors
• 256 gb of storage, with at least 50 gb free to turn recall on
• device encryption or bitlocker switched on
• windows hello enhanced sign in security with at least one biometric option

the windows 11 specifications page names the qualifying chips: amd ryzen ai 300 and 400 series, intel core ultra 200v and 300v series, and snapdragon x series. snapshots pause once free space drops below 25 gb. the support page now lists a windows 11 ai+ pc next to the copilot+ pc, with the same 40 tops line.

rewind asked far less. its archived homepage said it was optimized for apple silicon m1 and m2 chips and also ran on any intel mac. it quoted 20% to 40% of a single core while recording, or 1% to 5% of total cpu.

where does each keep your data, and how is it encrypted?

both kept the archive on the machine. the difference is how much engineering sits around it.

rewind stored all recordings locally on your mac. it claimed a 3,750x compression rate, with users typically filling 14 gb a month, and its homepage said the data was encrypted.

recall sizes its store to your drive. microsoft's admin page says it allocates 25 gb on a 256 gb device, 75 gb on 512 gb and 150 gb on 1 tb or more. that is roughly 10% to 15% of the drive, and the oldest snapshots go first when it fills. administrators can cap retention at 30, 60, 90 or 180 days.

encryption is where microsoft spent its rebuild. its september 27, 2024 architecture post says snapshots and the vector database are always encrypted. the keys are protected by the tpm, tied to your windows hello identity and usable only inside a virtualization based security enclave. microsoft says recall does not share snapshots with microsoft or third parties. in the european economic area, users can also export snapshots to apps they trust.

why was microsoft recall so controversial?

because the first preview left its text index readable. on june 4, 2024, wired and ars technica reported that the preview kept captured text in an sqlite database protected only by disk encryption. researcher alexander hagenah released totalrecall, which pulled a day of data in two seconds at most, building on kevin beaumont's findings.

microsoft changed course in public. on june 7, 2024 it made recall opt in, required windows hello, and added just in time decryption and an encrypted search index. on june 13 it pulled the june 18 launch into the windows insider program.

insiders on snapdragon pcs got a preview on november 22, 2024. on april 25, 2025 microsoft announced general availability, still with a preview label. it also claimed recall can take up to 70% less time to find a presentation, from testing it commissioned.

the argument did not end there. in april 2026, itnews and cso online reported hagenah's totalrecall reloaded. it leaves the encryption alone and reads data from the process that draws the timeline, once the user unlocks recall with windows hello. microsoft closed his report on april 3, saying the behaviour did "not represent a bypass of a security boundary." our longer read is is microsoft recall safe.

microsoft recall vs rewind ai at a glance

this table compares microsoft recall vs rewind ai as of october 2026, using each vendor's own figures.

is rewind or recall still available?

recall is still shipping, and rewind is not. the two ended up in opposite places.

by december 2025 the company behind rewind was called limitless, and its december 2025 notice announced that meta had acquired it. that page said the service was unavailable in brazil, china, the european union, israel, south korea, turkey and the united kingdom from december 5, 2025. it also said the latest rewind update disables all screen and audio capture starting december 19, 2025.

as of october 2026 the rewind.ai domain serves an unrelated ai tools site. the full timeline is in what happened to rewind ai.

recall ships on copilot+ pcs and is still listed as recall (preview) on microsoft's specifications page. saving snapshots stays off until you opt in. on managed business and school devices, recall is removed until an administrator allows it.

which should you choose?

the platform decides this before any feature does. here is our judgement:

1. on windows with a copilot+ pc: recall is built in, and its rebuilt security design is serious work. turn it on only if the machine holds your own data, and set exclusions first.
2. on windows without that hardware: recall will not run, so look at a cross platform tool such as screenpipe, which runs on macos, windows and linux.
3. on a mac: neither. rewind is gone, and recall does not run on macos. microsoft recall for mac covers what apple ships and what fills the gap, and rewind ai alternatives lays out the field.

rewind's ending holds a lesson for either choice. a screen archive is only yours if it lives on hardware you control and survives the vendor changing its plans, as we argue in what happens to your data when an ai app shuts down.

where remynd fits

remynd is the mac app we build for the job rewind used to do. it records the windows on your screen except the apps and sites you exclude, reads text from the window you are working in with apple vision, and keeps the recordings and the searchable index on your mac. call audio is transcribed on your mac with an mlx model.

press control + space and type a word, or phrase the search as a question. when a search reads like a question, only the words you typed, any filters, the date and your time zone go to our ai to plan it, through providers with zero data retention. your history and results are never in that request.

it is free to download for apple silicon macs on macos 14 or later. the details are on our security page, and the direct comparison is remynd vs microsoft recall.

download remynd for mac and keep the archive of what you saw on your own mac, where a vendor shutting down cannot take it with them.