Perplexity's Comet Browser Is Coming to iPhone

If you've been watching the AI browser space, you already know Perplexity has been making moves. The company launched its AI-powered Comet browser for Mac last summer, and now it's bringing that same experience to iPhone. The app is already listed on the App Store with a pre-order page, and it goes live on March 11, 2026. This isn't a minor update or a rebrand of an existing app. It's a full AI-native browser built specifically around the way people actually use the internet today, and it's arriving at a moment when the competition for your default browser has never been more interesting.

The Browser Wars Are Back, and AI Is the New Battleground

For most of the last decade, the browser conversation was basically over. Chrome won on desktop, Safari won on iPhone, and everyone else was fighting for scraps. The functionality gap between browsers narrowed to the point where most people stopped thinking about which one they used and just defaulted to whatever came installed on their device. That era is ending fast. The rise of AI tools has cracked open the browser market in a way that nothing has since mobile browsing took off, and companies like Perplexity are rushing into that gap with something genuinely different.

Comet isn't built like a traditional browser with AI features layered on top as an afterthought. The entire product is designed around AI-assisted browsing from the ground up, which means the assistant isn't a sidebar you toggle on when you need it. It's the core experience. That distinction matters more than it might sound because it changes the fundamental relationship between you and the web.

What Comet Actually Does

The practical pitch for Comet is simple even if the technology behind it isn't. Instead of opening a browser, running a search, clicking through results, opening tabs, and then separately pasting content into a ChatGPT window to make sense of it all, Comet handles the entire loop inside one interface. You can summarize pages, research topics, compare products, schedule things, and get answers without the constant context switching that makes heavy browsing sessions so exhausting.

The App Store listing describes Comet as a "personal assistant and thinking partner," which sounds like standard tech marketing but is actually a decent description of what the product is trying to do. The browser learns your habits over time, adapts to how you think and work, and tries to keep you organized without you having to manually manage everything. One of the more practical features is tab and idea tracking, which sounds simple but solves a real problem. Most people who use their phone for research end up with a graveyard of open tabs they're too scared to close because they might need something later. Comet is designed to eliminate that anxiety by making sure nothing falls through the cracks.

The unified AI search is probably the feature that will get the most attention. Rather than treating search and browsing as two separate activities, Comet integrates them so that every search is also a conversation and every page you visit can immediately feed into a broader research session. For students, journalists, marketers, or anyone who spends serious time online gathering information, that's a workflow improvement worth paying attention to.

How It Stacks Up Against the Competition

Perplexity isn't the only company thinking about AI browsers. The space has gotten crowded quickly, with several startups and even some established players experimenting with AI-first browsing experiences. What Perplexity has going for it is a head start and a product that already has real users. Comet launched on Mac last summer and has been available on Windows and Android as well, which means the iPhone version isn't a first-gen experiment. It's a mature product being ported to the last major platform it wasn't on yet.

That cross-platform availability also matters for adoption. People don't just use one device, and a browser that only works on your laptop or only on your phone is a half-solution. Having Comet available across Mac, Windows, Android, and soon iPhone means users can build a consistent browsing workflow that follows them across devices. That's the kind of ecosystem play that makes a product sticky in a way that a single-platform app never really can be.

The one notable absence right now is iPad. There's no iPad version confirmed for the March launch, which is a bit of a head-scratcher given how naturally a research-focused browser would fit on a larger screen. iPad users who do serious research work are probably some of the most natural early adopters for a product like this, so that gap will likely get filled eventually, but for now it's not part of the March rollout.

What We Still Don't Know

Pricing is still an open question. Perplexity runs a freemium model for its core search product, offering a solid free tier alongside a paid Pro plan that unlocks more powerful features and higher usage limits. It's reasonable to expect Comet to follow a similar structure, but nothing has been officially confirmed. If the free tier is generous enough to be genuinely useful, adoption could be fast. If it's too restricted, casual users might not bother switching from whatever they're already using.

There's also the question of how Apple handles a browser that's this deeply integrated with an outside AI system. Apple has its own AI ambitions with Apple Intelligence, and Safari is deeply tied into the iOS ecosystem in ways that third-party browsers have always had to work around. Comet will run on WebKit like every other third-party browser on iPhone, which is an Apple requirement, so there are inherent limitations on what it can do compared to the Mac version. Whether those limitations meaningfully affect the experience is something that won't be clear until the app is actually in people's hands.

Why This Is Worth Paying Attention To

The browser is the most used app on most people's phones, and it's been more or less the same for years. Perplexity is making a serious bet that people are ready for something different, and the timing feels right. AI adoption has moved faster than almost anyone predicted, and the friction of switching between a browser and a separate AI tool is something more and more people are running into every day. Comet is designed to remove that friction entirely, and if it delivers on that promise, it could pull a meaningful chunk of users away from Safari and Chrome in a way that no browser has managed to do in a long time.

The pre-order is live in the App Store right now, and the app drops on March 11. If you do any serious research, content work, or just find yourself drowning in browser tabs on a daily basis, it's worth keeping an eye on.