What are you recording?
Pick the one that sounds like your week. Each page is about that job on its own: what you would actually use it for, and where I would tell you to buy something else.
Lawyers and legal teams
The intake, the witness, the note you write in the car park
Doctors and clinicians
Between two patients, on a ward round, on a home visit
Therapists and counsellors
The note you make in the ten minutes after a session
Journalists and editors
A two hour interview, and a source who must stay unfindable
Bankers and financial advisers
The deal nobody has announced yet
Defence and military operations
Unclassified work, in places with no network at all
Teachers and lecturers
Parents' evening, a hard conversation, your own lesson back
Researchers and academics
Forty interviews, and an ethics form you must keep true
HR and workplace investigations
The meeting that gets read back to you a year later
Human rights and humanitarian work
Testimony that has to outlive the recording of it
Not one of these? Most people who buy it are just recording their own meetings, and the promise is the same: nothing you record leaves the phone.
Straight answers
What do these ten have in common?
Somebody else is on the recording. A client, a patient, a source, a pupil, a witness: none of them chose the software, and all of them are in the file afterwards. The duty outlives the meeting, and so does a copy sitting on somebody's server.
They share the conditions too. Prisons, hospitals, basements, aircraft, field sites and rural schools: an app that needs a connection to give you any text back fails where this work happens. And for all ten the transcript is the work, not a nice extra, so it has to be searchable, editable and exportable.
Where is Just Transcribe wrong for all ten?
Six things, repeated on every page. No live captions, because transcription runs after the recording rather than while somebody is still speaking. No sync and no shared workspace, so files live on one device. No compliance archive: no retention rules, no legal hold, no supervised review. No chain of custody, which makes it fine for your own notes and wrong for an exhibit. No recovery, because there is no server holding a backup. And no Windows or web version: it runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Android, and the Mac app needs macOS 26 or later.
One more that is not the app's fault: keeping the audio on the device makes the device the weak point. A passcode, Face ID and device encryption are the security model here, not optional extras.
Is this just marketing dressed up as ten landing pages?
Partly, yes. They exist because people search for their own job, and I would rather they find a page that names the limitations than one that does not. What I can do is keep every factual claim checkable: what the app does is on the fact sheet with sources, and every page here carries a section listing the work it cannot do.
My job is not on the list. Does that mean the app is not for me?
No. These ten were picked because they have a confidentiality duty that makes the argument sharp, not because they are the only users. Most people who buy it are recording their own meetings, lectures or ideas and simply prefer not to hand the audio to a company. If none of the ten fits, the buyer's guide asks the question the other way round.
Does on-device transcription mean it is less accurate?
It means the model has to fit on a phone. There are twenty-one to choose from and the difference is real: the smallest is fast and rough, the large ones are considerably better, and four questions in the app point at the one that suits your language and your recording. On ordinary speech in a decent recording the large models are competitive with cloud services. On a noisy four-person meeting in a reverberant room, nothing is good, on-device or otherwise.
Can I prove to my compliance team that nothing is uploaded?
You can test it yourself, which is better than proof from me. Download a model on wifi, switch the phone to airplane mode, then record and transcribe. Text with the radios off means the model ran on the device. The App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected, and Advanced Privacy explains the mode that also erases the audio afterwards.
What does it cost per seat?
Nothing, because there are no seats. The app is a free download with two speech models included forever. The full unlock is EUR 9.99 once per Apple account, not per month and not per user, and it restores across your own devices. There is no team plan, no volume licence and no invoice to chase, which is convenient right up until your procurement department asks for one.