Resource Center › Install and set up
Three questions decide it: which of your devices, which AI you use, and whether anyone else needs the pages.
A Showspace is a folder, and lite.computer opens any folder your Mac can see. Local disk, iCloud Drive and Google Drive all open the same way in the app. What changes is everything outside it.
So the question is not which one the app prefers. It is what else needs to reach that folder. Three things might, and they pull in different directions. Work through them in order.
Only this Mac. Any folder will do, and local disk is the fastest of the three: nothing waits on a download.
One trap is worth knowing about. macOS can put your Desktop and Documents folders into iCloud Drive, and it is switched on for a lot of people who never chose it. If it is on for you, a Showspace at ~/Documents/Lite is a synced folder whatever else you meant it to be. That catches the app's own defaults: it creates ~/Documents/Lite for you, and puts the sample Showspace in ~/Documents too. Check System Settings › your name › iCloud › Drive, for Desktop & Documents Folders. To be certain a Showspace stays on this Mac, keep it outside those two folders; ~/Showspaces does the job.
This Mac and another Mac. iCloud Drive or Google Drive. Both keep one folder in step across machines, and the app on each opens it normally.
Your iPhone or iPad. iCloud Drive. The pages appear in the Files app, and a lite.computer app for iPhone is in build that reads Showspaces from iCloud Drive. Google Drive is the weakest of the three here: its iOS app does not reliably tell other apps when a file has changed, so a Drive Showspace on a phone can show you yesterday's version until you open the Drive app yourself and force it to catch up.
This is the question people get wrong, because “my AI” covers two kinds of software that reach completely different things.
An agent that can write files on your Mac — Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, or a desktop chat app that has been given a file-writing tool. The test is whether it can save to a path you name, not merely whether it runs on your Mac. Such an agent writes to your disk directly, so it can write into any of the three. An iCloud or Google Drive folder looks like an ordinary folder to it.
If that is how you work, this question does not narrow anything down. Decide on questions 1 and 3 instead.
An assistant you talk to in a browser or a phone app — Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude or Grok on the web. It has no path to your disk at all. It reaches your files only through a connector, and connectors are not evenly available:
One caution about those connectors. They are reliably good at reading your Drive. Writing is newer, patchier, and mostly aimed at Google Docs and Sheets rather than at saving a real .html file into a folder you choose. It also changes from month to month. Test it with one page before you build a habit on it.
The dependable way to get HTML pages written is still an agent running on your Mac. A Drive connector is best thought of as a way for your other assistants to read what that agent has already made.
Nobody. Any of the three works. Local disk keeps the folder off every sync service, which is worth being precise about: the pages are not copied to anyone's cloud, but an agent that reads them still sends what it reads to its own provider. Keeping a Showspace local is not the same as nothing leaving your Mac.
A few people, all on Apple devices. iCloud Drive shares a folder cleanly between Apple accounts.
Anyone else — a client, a colleague on Windows, a whole team. Google Drive. Shared as Anyone with the link, a folder opens for someone with no account of their own — though a company Workspace can forbid that setting. iCloud can do this in principle, but people without an Apple Account run into sign-in prompts, and a shared folder wants to be added to their iCloud Drive rather than simply downloaded.
Set your expectations, whichever you pick. Neither service renders an HTML page in a browser. Google Drive shows the file's source or downloads it; iCloud is no better. So sharing a Showspace through cloud storage hands somebody the files, which they download and open themselves. It does not give them a site to click around in. If that is what you want, you want a web host, not a Drive folder.
Most people land in one of these:
About those other drives. Anything that installs a desktop client and gives you a real folder on your Mac will work. Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, Sync — the app cannot tell them apart, and an agent on your Mac writes into them exactly as it writes anywhere else. Sharing works the way you would expect, by link.
Two things differ, and both are worth checking before you commit a Showspace to one. On an iPhone or iPad they share Google Drive's weakness: a third-party service does not reliably tell other apps that a file has changed, so what you see there can lag behind what your agent wrote. And connector support is uneven and moves around — whether your browser assistant can reach Dropbox or OneDrive is a question for that assistant's own connector list today, not for a help page written months ago. Look it up rather than assume it.
If two of those describe you, nothing says you may only have one. The app holds several Showspaces and switches between them from the Showspace switcher, so a private local one and a shared Drive one can sit side by side.
A Showspace is a folder. Move it whenever you like: drag it to the new place, then open it again from the Showspace switcher.
Then change the path in your agent's instructions. This is the step people forget. An agent told to write to the old path keeps writing there quite happily, and the pages stop appearing. See Connect your AI to the app.
iCloud Drive, Google Drive and Dropbox all clear out the contents of files you have not opened lately, leaving the name behind. The app handles this and shows those pages as waiting rather than broken. See iCloud and Google Drive: files still in the cloud.
Still stuck? Write to support@lite.computer. A person reads it.