The candidate Brightroom is built for rarely studies in three-hour blocks at a desk. They study in the gaps — a set of questions before a 9 a.m. standup, a lesson on the train, a Saturday mock that gets interrupted twice and finished anyway. For two years the work has lived behind a browser tab, which is to say it has lived at a desk. That is the widest gap between how Brightroom is designed and how it is actually used.
Companion closes it. Companion is the Brightroom app for iPhone — native, signed in to the account you already have, reading from the same engine the website does. It enters public beta in July. For everyone on a Pro or Ultra plan, it is included: no new tier, no add-on, no second charge.
One account, one record
Companion is not a second product with its own login and its own copy of your progress. It signs in to the same account as brightroom.com and reads the same data. The mastery vector — the per-skill ability estimate the engine keeps for you, the thing that decides which question comes next — is a single object. Answer ten Data Insights questions on the phone at lunch, and the roadmap waiting on your laptop that evening has already been rewritten against them.
The everyday form of that is the resume card. Begin a Mock section on the web, close the laptop in the middle of question fourteen, and Companion opens to question fourteen, the section timer where you left it. Nothing is re-tracked and nothing is reconciled later. There is one session because there is one account.
Native, not a wrapper
Companion is written in Swift, screen by screen. It is not the website inside a frame. The Mock runner, the calculator, the per-question notes, the section timer — each is real native interface, drawn by the phone, answering the touch with no page to reload. The type, the spacing, and the two colour modes are ported from the same design tokens the web uses, so the app is unmistakably Brightroom without being a screenshot of it.
That choice costs more to build, and it is worth it. A web page in a shell stutters on exactly the actions a test surface needs to feel instant — selecting an answer, flagging a question, opening the scratchpad. Native removes the stutter, follows the system into dark mode after sunset, and keeps the work legible one-handed on a train.
What the beta includes
The beta is not a teaser; it carries the spine of the product. The dashboard opens on a greeting, the days left in your plan, and the one thing to continue. Practice and Section drills run the same adaptive engine, in sessions sized to the time you actually have. The Mock Exam runner brings the section-locked timer, the three-change budget, and the break screen to the phone — the GMAT® Focus rules, unsoftened. The Library renders its lessons natively: predict, reveal, synthesise, the interactive widgets and all. Roadmap shows the plan the engine writes each night; Analytics shows the mastery, the pacing drift, and the predicted band. Account does the unglamorous, important things — export your data as a file, manage your plan, reset your password, and delete your account outright, every record, in one action.
Included, not sold separately
If you are on a Pro or Ultra plan, Companion costs nothing and asks for nothing. Sign in with your usual email; the app reads your active plan and opens straight to the work, with no paywall and no prompt to buy what you have already bought. The plan you hold on the web is the plan you hold on the phone, because it is one entitlement on one account.
Someone who meets Brightroom on the App Store first — no web account yet — opens the same five-day trial the web offers, and finds the same four plans behind it. Whichever door you came through, there is one account and, at most, one charge. Never two.
Beta means beta
Beta is the accurate word, and the scope is deliberate. The spine ships in the open while the edges are finished there, rather than holding the whole app another quarter for the last ten per cent. What is in, and what follows, stated plainly:
| In the July beta | Arriving during the beta |
|---|---|
| Sign-in, sync, and resume across web and phone | Push reminders for the day’s plan |
| Practice, Section drills, and the full Mock runner | Every Data Insights answer format (multiple-choice first) |
| The Library, Roadmap, Analytics, and account controls | A layout drawn for iPad |
It runs on iPad today, at iPhone size, and it does not yet send a notification. Those are edges, named here so the beta is exactly what it says it is.
Why it matters
The ceiling on a working candidate’s score is rarely comprehension. It is repetition — how many times the material has been in front of them under conditions close to the test. The desk caps repetition at the hours spent at the desk, and those hours are exactly what a demanding job takes first. The twenty minutes on a train, the ten before a meeting, the queue at lunch: individually small, collectively most of a week.
The work is the same work — the same engine, the same record, the same honest mock. It now fits in a pocket and travels with the candidate who never had three uninterrupted hours to begin with. That is the entire point.
— Brightroom Product