How to Download DeepSeek: App, Web, and Local Weights

I once searched "DeepSeek download for PC," clicked the shiniest store listing, hit Install — and only afterwards noticed the developer line read something like softwaretailor.com. Not DeepSeek. Not official. Just a wrapper riding the name.

That moment is why this guide exists. "Downloading DeepSeek" sounds like one task, but it's really three, and picking the wrong door is how people end up on knockoff pages in the first place. Here's the map; every claim below traces back to official pages or a hands-on check of the listings themselves — I went through the store listings one by one, which is how the knockoffs above got their names.

Three different things people call "downloading DeepSeek"

Think of it like settling into a new city. You have three options, with very different commitments:

1. The mobile app — renting a hotel room. Turnkey, free, someone else handles everything.
2. The web app — a long-lease apartment. Still managed, but you bring your own browser and it works on any desktop.
3. The open weights — buying the whole building. Maximum control, and the plumbing (all 156 GB of it) is now your problem.

Most people want the first or second. Developers sometimes want the third. Fake download sites thrive on the confusion between them, so deciding which one you actually need is step zero — the rest of this guide walks each path in order.

Download the official DeepSeek app (Android and iOS)

Start at the official download page. That's it — one page, maintained by the company, and everything else in this section comes from it and the official app announcement.

What the app gives you

When the app launched in January 2025, the announcement was unusually blunt about money: "100% FREE — No ads, no in-app purchases." That's not a freemium teaser; there is no paid tier hiding behind the chat box. What you get:

• Login via email, Google account, or Apple ID
• Chat history that syncs across platforms — start on the phone, continue on the web
• Web search and the DeepThink reasoning mode
• File upload with text extraction

You won't find a simpler install this week, and the price tag is exactly what it claims to be. If you want the longer version of what's free and what isn't across the whole product, we cover that separately in our DeepSeek free-tier guide.

Android: Play Store and the alternative markets

On the official page, the primary button reads "Get on Google Play." Tap it, confirm the developer is DeepSeek, install — done.

Below that sits a second option: "Alternative Download Methods." That's the official doorway to major Android app markets beyond Google's store, a channel the company has supported since launch day. Same rule applies whichever market you use: check the publisher name before you tap install.

iPhone: the App Store route

iOS users get "View iOS Download Methods," which leads to the App Store listing. Same drill — publisher check, install, log in. There's no sideloading to worry about here; Apple's review process makes the App Store the least risky of the three channels.

DeepSeek for PC and Mac: what's real, what isn't

Here's the part most guides dance around. There is no official DeepSeek desktop client. The official download page offers exactly two things: Google Play and iOS methods. No Windows button, no macOS download, nothing — and that absence is your answer, straight from the source.

The web app is the desktop app

For a desktop experience, the official route is DeepSeek's web app. Log in with the same account you use on mobile and your synced history is right there. It behaves like a native app in practice: pin the tab, or install it as a PWA from your browser's menu, and you'll have a launchable window with its own icon.

It's the long-lease apartment from our earlier metaphor. You're not buying hardware, you're not maintaining anything — you just show up and the place works, on any machine with a browser.

Those store listings aren't DeepSeek

Search any app store for the name and you'll find plenty that look official. We checked the Microsoft Store's results and pulled up the listing pages themselves. That "AI Reasoning" app powering itself with DeepSeek models? Its developer metadata points to softwaretailor.com — a third party, not the company. The listing banks on you seeing the name and not the byline.

This isn't an accusation against any single wrapper — some are honest about being third-party clients. What saves you is the check itself, and it takes five seconds: on any platform, open the listing and read the developer/publisher line. If it doesn't say DeepSeek, you're installing someone else's software that happens to mention the name.

Fake download sites: the official warning, and a 30-second check

The impersonator problem is real enough that the company addressed it head-on in the app announcement: "Download only from official channels to avoid being misled." That's an official quote, in bold on their own news page — when a vendor puts a warning like that in a launch post, it's because the fake ecosystem was already thick.

What do the fakes look like? Like a corner shop with "Starbuks" painted over the door. In search results we found domains one letter off from the real thing, hyphenated variants, ".com.cn" and ".online" lookalikes, and words stitched onto the brand — "download-" and "-ai" prefixes that feel plausible. They count on your eye skimming the shape of the word rather than reading it.

The 30-second check, before installing anything:

1. Read the domain, letter by letter. The real estate is deepseek.com and download.deepseek.com. Anything else — extra letters, hyphens, different endings — is not theirs.
2. In a store, read the developer line. Covered above; it's the same discipline.
3. When in doubt, start from the source. Search "DeepSeek" in your store or type the official domain yourself, rather than following a link from a search ad or a forum.

None of this is paranoia. It's the same reflex you already use for banking sites — and an AI chat app gets your conversations, your uploaded files, and your login email.

Download DeepSeek model weights to run locally

Now the third door — the one developers knock on. The model weights are genuinely open under the MIT license, so you can grab them and run the model on your own iron, offline, with no account anywhere. The official Hugging Face organization carries the verified source: 100-plus models, with the current V4-Flash release past 3.5 million downloads.

At the heart of all this sits V4-Flash, a 284B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts system with 13B active per token and a 1M-token context window — background we cover in the V4 guide. What matters for your download plans is the size.

The hardware reality: 156 GB of RAM

This is the number tutorial blogs liked to skip in the R1 era, and the number I personally had to go find on a spec sheet before believing it, so let's say it plainly: LM Studio's model page states that running the smallest current V4 model takes at least 156 GB of RAM, with the full file weighing in at 156.40 GB. Not disk space you can shuffle around — memory.

Unsloth's quantization specialists trim it further: their 3-bit build comes in around 103 GB and fits a 110 GB-RAM machine, while their Q8 build (about 162 GB) is bit-for-bit lossless, thanks to the model storing most of its experts natively in a compressed format. Impressive engineering — and still a workstation-class bill of materials. Buying the building was never the cheap option.

If your machine can't host that, the honest answer is that your "local" options are actually cloud options — or skip ahead to the decision table below.

Ollama, and the cloud-tag trap

On Ollama's library page, the model shows nearly 400,000 pulls, and the getting-started command looks reassuringly local:

ollama run deepseek-v4-flash:cloud

See that :cloud suffix? It's the trap. Every listed variant ends in -cloud, which means the command routes your prompt to Ollama's hosted inference — nothing lands on your disk. It's a chauffeur service with "self-drive" painted on the door. Useful, cheap, officially supported… just not local, despite how the command reads.

Where Ollama's version genuinely shines is wiring the model into coding agents — their own docs show launching it straight into Claude Code and similar tools:

ollama launch claude --model deepseek-v4-flash:cloud

We walk through that whole setup, with the API key side of it, in the Claude Code integration guide.

LM Studio: the local GGUF route

LM Studio is where actual local files live. That same model page declaring the 156 GB requirement offers the real download — the full GGUF, pulled over 144,000 times, updated regularly. If you own a machine that can feed it, this is the genuine buy-the-building path: pick your quantization, watch the progress bar, run offline.

LM Studio also offers the model as hosted inference on their own cloud, priced separately from DeepSeek's official API — different product, different bill, worth knowing so the two never get confused in your head.

Hugging Face: where the weights live

For everyone else in this ecosystem — researchers, other tooling, the curious — the canonical source is that verified Hugging Face organization linked above. Every variant, every release, MIT-licensed, downloadable with or without any intermediary app. If a tutorial sends you anywhere else for weights, be as suspicious as you'd be at the "Starbuks" counter.

Which download route fits you

The building metaphor, condensed into a table:

You want…	Your route	First action
Chat on your phone	Mobile app	Hit Google Play or the App Store from the official page
DeepSeek on PC or Mac	Web app	Open the web app in your browser, pin or install the PWA
To code with it, cheaply	API / agent setup	Follow the Claude Code guide, point your tool at an API key
Fully offline, private runs	Local weights	Check your RAM against 156 GB, then LM Studio (or Unsloth's quants)

Pick one today and act on it: install the app and send one message, or pin the web tab, or — if you're the workstation owner — start the GGUF download before bed and let it run overnight. Each path takes under five minutes to begin, except the last, which takes five minutes to begin and a very long night of bandwidth.

FAQ

Is there an official DeepSeek desktop app for Windows or Mac?

No. As of this writing, the official download page lists only Google Play and iOS channels. Your desktop experience is the web app. Anything in the Microsoft Store or elsewhere carrying the name is a third-party product — check the developer line before installing.

Is the DeepSeek app free to download and use?

Yes. It's stated in bold in the official announcement: 100% free, no ads, no in-app purchases. Your phone's normal data charges apply, of course, and the company's API for developers is priced separately — that's a different product with its own pricing guide.

How do I know a DeepSeek download site is fake?

Read the domain letter by letter — official pages live on deepseek.com and its subdomains — and in app stores, read the developer line. Even the company itself warns to "download only from official channels to avoid being misled." Search ads and lookalike domains are where the fakes concentrate.

Can DeepSeek run fully offline on my own hardware?

Yes, the weights are MIT-licensed and downloadable. But "on my own hardware" means serious hardware: the smallest current model needs on the order of 156 GB of RAM at full quality, or around 110 GB with aggressive 3-bit quantization (figures per LM Studio and Unsloth, which may change — treat their pages as current source of truth). Most laptops should use the app, web, or API instead.

Do I need to download anything to use the API?

No. The API is a network service — you paste a key into your tool or code and call it over HTTPS. Nothing to install, nothing to host. Our API key guide covers getting one in a few minutes.