Car documents are unusually personal. A registration ties a vehicle to a name and an address. An insurance policy carries a policy number and a claims history. A workshop invoice records where the car was on a given day. "Our app uses AI" is not an adequate description of what happens to that.
Here is the actual arrangement.
Two models, deliberately split
Apple Intelligence — on your device
On supported iPhones, Apple's on-device model handles the everyday work: deciding what type of document something is, suggesting tags, generating a title, and producing short summaries. This runs locally. The document is not uploaded, and the processing works without a network connection.
On-device models are small, with a limited context window. That is a real constraint, not a marketing detail — it determines what the second model is for.
Google Gemini — in the cloud
Deeper extraction needs a larger model: reading a multi-page workshop invoice and pulling out each line item, parsing a manufacturer's maintenance schedule into intervals, extracting the terms of a lease contract, interpreting a vehicle history report, or mapping the columns of an unfamiliar CSV export.
For those tasks, the document is sent to Google's Gemini API for analysis and the structured result comes back and is stored on your device.
Why not just use one?
On-device only would mean the app could tell you "this is a service invoice" but not reliably extract the line items, mileage and parts from it — losing most of what makes the history useful. Cloud only would mean sending every document to a server for tasks a local model handles perfectly well. The split keeps routine classification private and reserves the cloud for work that genuinely needs a larger model.
Where your data lives
- Documents and photos: on your device.
- Records — history, expenses, insurance, tires: in a local database on your device.
- Backups: your own iCloud Drive, or a file you export and keep yourself.
- MyGarage servers: there are none holding your documents. There is no account to create.
The trade-off is stated plainly: because there is no account and no cloud copy by default, a lost device without a backup means lost documents. Set up iCloud backup or export a backup file early.
What is never collected
- No account registration, so no email, name or password
- No personal information gathered for us
- No selling or sharing of document contents
The full terms are in the privacy policy.
Turning the analysis off
Document parsing is a setting. With it off, documents are still stored, still readable and still searchable — the app simply stops deriving timeline entries, expense rows and reminders from them. Auto-filing is a separate toggle: leave it off and you get a suggestion instead of an automatic folder assignment.
Device security
The app can be locked with a passcode or with Face ID / Touch ID, so the documents are not readable by someone holding an unlocked phone.
Get MyGarage
Available on the App Store and Google Play.