ReMyndThe short version: Limitless, the company Rewind became, announced on 5 December 2025 that it was joining Meta. Screen and audio capture in the Rewind Mac app was switched off on 19 December 2025. The archive you already recorded is still sitting on your disk. What stopped was new capture. This page is about what actually carries over to another app, and what does not.
What happened to Rewind AI, precisely
Rewind was not switched off in one step, and the distinction matters when you are deciding what to trust next.
Meta's acquisition of Limitless was announced on 5 December 2025 (9to5Mac, CNBC). Pendant production ended at the same time. Users in Brazil, China, the EU, Israel, South Korea, Turkey and the UK lost access immediately and had until 19 December 2025 to export before deletion.
The Limitless Desktop and Web apps went too, not only the older Rewind app. Limitless's own wording is that you "will no longer be able to record using the Limitless Desktop App or Limitless Web App," with previously recorded meetings accessible throughout 2026 (limitless.ai).
The domain is the strangest part. rewind.ai now hosts an unrelated free AI tools site whose own page says it "is an independent free AI tools platform with no affiliation to the original Rewind AI, Limitless, or Meta" (rewind.ai).
None of that is a reason to gloat. A lot of people paid for that app, liked it, and built a habit around it. The useful question now is a narrow one.
What you lost
You lost less than it feels like, and more than the export button implies.
An engineer teardown of the original app found that Rewind kept everything under ~/Library/Application Support/com.memoryvault.MemoryVault as H.264 chunks of roughly 180MB per hour plus a local SQLite database of roughly 26MB per hour, with OCR done by Apple's on-device Vision framework and transcription by a bundled local Whisper model, and "no cloud synchronization" (Kevin Chen). Those files are still yours. They are just no longer growing, and no longer searchable through the app.
The same teardown found the part nobody advertises: "Rewind currently doesn't encrypt data at rest. Any app with full disk access... has the ability to read recordings from all time." If you are still holding that library, treat it accordingly.
There were losses that had nothing to do with files. Clinicians lost HIPAA protections and had to move platforms, and the suggested minimum age dropped from 18 to 13 (SF Standard, 14 December 2025).
And one Hacker News comment captured the real grievance better than any analyst did. User joisig wrote that the Mac app was kneecapped "even though it could probably have continued to function as a local-only thing" (Hacker News). That is the thing to shop for now.
What carries over to a new Mac app, and what does not
Most of the habit carries over to a new app. Most of the data does not.
| Carries over | Does not carry over | |
|---|---|---|
| Your muscle memory | A hotkey, a timeline, a search box that expects plain English | Rewind's exact shortcuts and UI |
| Your old recordings | The files on your disk, readable with ffmpeg and a SQLite browser | Importing them into another product's index |
| The workflow | Continuous capture, OCR, ask a question about last Tuesday | Anything that lived on Limitless's servers |
| The pendant | Nothing | Production ended on 5 December 2025 |
| The permission grant | Screen recording and microphone, granted again to the new app | A one-time grant, on macOS Sequoia and later |
| The pricing you had | Nothing | Pendant was $99, free was $0, Pro was reported at $19/mo and Unlimited at $49/mo |
Two notes on that table. The pricing figures are secondary sourced: the $99 pendant comes from WinBuzzer and the $19 and $49 subscription tiers from a Fast.io review, because Limitless's own pricing page now returns a 404. Limitless currently states that existing customers "get the unlimited plan for free" (limitless.ai).
And the permission grant is a real, permanent tax on every third-party capture app on the Mac. Apple introduced a recurring re-consent prompt for screen recording in macOS Sequoia. It was planned as weekly, then softened to monthly in beta 6 after complaints (9to5Mac, Apple Developer Forums). No third-party app can remove that prompt. Anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.
What should you look for in a replacement?
Ask five questions, in this order, and make the vendor answer them in writing.
- Where does capture and storage physically live? If the answer is a server the vendor controls, you are buying the same failure mode again.
- What does my data look like on the day you disappear? The right answer names a folder and a file format. "You can export" is weaker than "it was always on your disk."
- What leaves the machine, exactly? Every product has some egress. Sign-in and crash reporting are almost universal. AI queries usually go to a model somewhere. A vendor that claims literally nothing leaves is either wrong or has not looked.
- Is it encrypted at rest? Rewind was not, by its own teardown, and that is the single most repeatable mistake in this category.
- What happens to calls? Whether the audio reaches a vendor at all is now a legal question, not only a privacy preference.
Where ReMynd fits, and where it does not
ReMynd is a local screen recording app for the Mac. It records your screen, reads the text on it, and turns the result into Mac screen memory you can search and ask questions about.
Capture and storage stay on your machine, or in a private encrypted bucket that you own. Call transcription runs on-device, so the audio does not have to reach us to become searchable text. Things that do leave: sign-in, crash reports, and the questions you ask the assistant, because those go to a model. That is the honest boundary, and it is the one worth checking with Little Snitch rather than taking on faith.
For agents, ReMynd ships an Open Agent window that drives a coding CLI you already have installed, such as Claude Code or Codex, against your own history. If you want to point it at a different model endpoint there is a custom API setting, and it currently expects the OpenAI Responses API.
ReMynd is closed source and Mac only. It does not import your old Rewind library. If either of those is disqualifying, the rest of this page will not change your mind, and it should not.
What about Screenpipe?
Screenpipe is the other serious answer, and it is worth your time.
It is a YC S26 company with roughly 21,400 GitHub stars and 2,181 forks as of September 2026, it runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and its source is public (GitHub). Paid tiers on its onboarding page are $21/mo or $250/yr for Basic and $42/seat/mo for Business (screenpipe.com), with personal non-commercial use free.
It is also already marketing directly at Rewind refugees, so any list of Rewind AI alternative options that leaves it out is not being straight with you. We wrote a longer, less flattering comparison at ReMynd vs Screenpipe, including the licence change that is easy to miss.
Does on-device transcription make recording calls legal?
No, and this is the one place where getting the nuance wrong is expensive.
A consolidated class action against Otter.ai survived a motion to dismiss on 13 August 2026, with Federal Wiretap Act, California Invasion of Privacy Act section 631 and Illinois biometric privacy claims all proceeding (Recording Law). The reasoning turned on the vendor: plaintiffs plausibly alleged that Otter "independently collects, retains, and uses communications for its own commercial purposes," which is what made it a third-party eavesdropper under section 631.
A product that transcribes on-device does not put a vendor in that position. That is a genuine structural difference from a cloud notetaker, and it is worth something.
It does nothing at all about your own duty. All-party consent under California Penal Code section 632 binds the person recording. Damages run to $5,000 per violation under section 637.2, and biometric claims carry $1,000 to $5,000 per violation without proof of harm. Tell people you are recording. This is competitive analysis and not legal advice, so talk to a lawyer first.
The honest summary
Pick the thing whose files you can still read when the vendor is gone.
That is the whole lesson of December 2025. The Rewind Mac app was, by independent teardown, genuinely local, and it was still switched off from the outside. The defence is not a better promise. It is an architecture where the recording, the index and the transcript sit somewhere you control, so that a corporate development announcement is inconvenient rather than fatal.
If you want that as a finished Mac app, download ReMynd. If you want it as source you can read, take Screenpipe. Either beats going back to a service that keeps your memory on its own servers, and after this year you already know why.