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Guide

Mobile pairing

Pair Orb Mobile with your Mac to watch, answer, and hand off sessions from your iPhone.

Pairing your phone

Pairing is a QR scan. Open the dock header on your Mac, scan the QR code with Orb Mobile, and that is the whole setup. The phone then talks straight to your Mac: no server of ours is ever in the middle. The connection is end to end encrypted with keys that only your two devices hold, and pairing registers a key that you can revoke at any time in Settings, under Devices.

Away from home with Tailscale

On the same Wi-Fi it works out of the box. Away from home, run Tailscale on both your Mac and your phone (the free personal plan is plenty) and Orb Mobile reaches your Mac over your own private tailnet. Orb operates no relay, so your terminal traffic never leaves devices you control.

Handing off control

One device drives a session at a time. Open a session on the phone and it takes control, while the Mac shows a Controlled by iPhone overlay. Click that overlay and the Mac takes control back, with the phone showing the mirrored message. The terminal keeps rendering on both sides the whole time.

What notifications contain

A notification carries only the fact that a session needs you, plus its name. Terminal output never travels through Apple or Expo push servers. Your Mac must be awake to send a notification, since it is the one doing the sending. More detail is on the security page.