Jinwoo Hong
ceafdcad2f
* perf(mobile): race the direct and relay dials from t=0 on every reconnect A foreground reconnect gave the direct dial a fixed 2.5s head start, and while that dial sat in 'connecting'/'handshaking' the supervisor refused to open a relay socket at all. A phone that is off the LAN paid the full head start on every reconnect and got nothing for it, and a phone whose relay dropped could only return to the LAN through three hysteresis probes. Both dials now start together and the first authenticated socket is adopted through the existing migrateTo cutover. Nothing about the migration machinery changes: only who is allowed to start a dial. - The relay dial now yields to a live session and to nothing else. An unfinished direct dial is progress on the other runner, not a reason to stand still. - The direct return probe grows a second adoption policy. Against a live relay hysteresis still has to prove direct stable; during a reconnect there is no session to protect, so an authenticated direct socket wins outright. probeNow pre-empts a pending 15s tick so that dial starts with the relay dial, not after it, and the dial itself no longer waits for the operation mutex — a relay dial holding it is exactly the case the race exists for. - A loser closes and books nothing. The relay dial withdraws inside migrateTo and returns 'aborted', so no backoff is booked against it; a direct socket that loses leaves the promotion streak untouched. Only a reconnect that both paths lose books a failure, once, on the relay cadence. Kept: the 30s background grace and the foreground gate, because a backgrounded phone must not open a billed relay splice; the shared failure cooldown, because a genuine relay failure still has to be paced; the hysteresis dwell after a migration, because it is what stops a marginal LAN flapping a healthy session. The accepted cost is one relay socket per reconnect for a phone that is on its LAN. It closes as soon as the direct path authenticates, before the resume confirm, because migrateTo only checks the abort predicate after E2EE auth. Tests that encoded the removed rules: - 'fails over when the direct retry loop publishes reconnecting' asserted no relay dial while direct was handshaking. The failover now precedes the direct client giving up, so it asserts the dial instead of its absence. - 'does not spend a queued relay retry while direct authentication is progressing' encoded the block outright; it now asserts the retry runs on the failure cadence while a handshake drags on. - The four grace-race cases move to mobile-endpoint-reconnect-race.test.ts as t=0, direct-wins, background/resume and both-lose cases. - Five relay-bookkeeping cases now state their premise with unreachableDirect. They describe a phone with no LAN, which used to be implicit and is now load-bearing: with a reachable LAN the direct socket wins those reconnects. * fix(mobile): withdraw a lost relay dial pre-handshake and damp blip races Review follow-up to 4e31130471. Racing both paths from t=0 was correct but charged the LAN case twice: once per reconnect in cell work, and again whenever the LAN flapped. Withdraw before the handshake. migrateTo only consults its abort predicate after E2EE authentication, so a dial that had already lost still made the cell reserve a splice and the desktop finish a key exchange. The establisher now watches the logical client across the dial and closes the cell socket the moment direct authenticates. In the common window, after relay-auth is on the wire and before the hello lands, nothing of the key exchange has started, so the withdrawal costs the desktop nothing. The dial still reports itself aborted and still books nothing. The watch is dropped once migrateTo returns, because past the cutover this session is the active path and a later direct promotion must not read as a reason to close the client's own socket. Damp races that a blip started. relayDialAllowed yields only to a live session and a lost race books nothing, so a flapping LAN drove one cell socket per blip with only the relay's per-host rate limiter as a backstop, and reaching that limiter would have converted a benign race into a booked relay failure. After a race is lost to direct, the next unforced race is suppressed for 2s, doubling per consecutive loss to a 30s cap. This is not backoff and is kept separate from it: a forced replacement is never damped, a relay dial that wins clears the streak, and a foreground resume clears it too, so the path the user is watching never waits. The window arms its own lapse timer, so a LAN that dies inside the window still reaches relay without a new trigger. A superseded cutover no longer escapes probe() as an unhandled rejection. Only the probe timer calls it, and it discards the promise, so the routine end of a lost race would have surfaced as one. Credential rotation moves to MobileRelayCredentialRefresh. The supervisor crossed the 300-line cap; rotation is a self-contained responsibility that only runs over a live direct connection, so it splits cleanly instead of taking a max-lines bump. * fix(mobile): end a damper window as soon as the direct path is really gone Round-2 review follow-up to 9a21da4326. The damper armed its window when direct won the race, and nothing shortened it. A LAN that died inside that window left the phone waiting out the whole thing, up to 30s at the cap, with only a log line to show for it. My previous commit body claimed the path the user watches never waits; that was true only of a foreground resume, and it is corrected here. Losing the direct path now collapses the wait to a 250ms floor, so the next recovery races almost at once. The floor is not zero because the reason the damper exists is a LAN that drops and comes straight back, and a disconnect is how such a blip begins. So the rest of the window is kept aside rather than spent: if direct returns inside the floor it was a blip and the window resumes, and if the floor lapses with direct still gone it was an outage and the held window is void. Without the second half, one blip would have bought a flapping LAN a free pass on every race that followed, which is the case the damper was added for. The streak itself is untouched by the clamp. A LAN that flaps all afternoon still escalates toward the cap; only the current wait is cut short. record() now takes the same forceReplacement guard as suppresses(), so a forced replacement that stands down cannot grow the streak or be read as a loss to direct. A lease rotation or a reconsidered network change is not a LAN that flapped. Also documents that a genuine relay failure deliberately does not reset the streak, and that the damper and the failure backoff serialize rather than stack: a damped attempt never reaches the dial that would book a cooldown. * fix(test): give the direct-probe fixture the race-era hooks The phase-1 probe test predates canDial and adoptsOutright, so its hooks literal threw at the first dial. These cases model a live relay session. * docs(mobile): say why a finished credential refresh races relay instead of waiting on direct
Orca Mobile
React Native companion app for Orca. Monitor worktrees, view terminal output, and send commands from your phone.
Local development uses two processes:
- Orca desktop/Electron from the repo root. This hosts the mobile WebSocket RPC server on port
6768. - Expo Metro from
mobile/. This serves the React Native app on port8081.
Unless a command says otherwise, run mobile app commands from the mobile/ directory.
Prerequisites
- Node.js 24+
- pnpm
- Xcode and/or Android Studio tooling for simulator or device builds
- Expo Go on your phone, or a development client build when native modules are needed
- Phone and desktop on the same LAN when testing a physical phone
Start Desktop Orca
From the repository root:
pnpm install
pnpm dev
Confirm the mobile RPC server is listening:
lsof -nP -iTCP:6768 -sTCP:LISTEN
Restart pnpm dev after changing Electron main-process code. Metro hot reload only applies to the mobile JavaScript bundle.
Start The Mobile App
cd mobile
pnpm install
pnpm start
Scan the Expo QR code with your phone's camera on iOS, or Expo Go on Android.
For a native dev-client build:
pnpm exec expo run:android
pnpm exec expo run:ios
pnpm start --dev-client
Pair With Desktop Orca
- Open Orca desktop.
- Go to Settings > Mobile.
- Scan the pairing QR code from the mobile app.
- Confirm the mobile host endpoint is
ws://<desktop-ip>:6768.
For the Android emulator, use ws://10.0.2.2:6768. For a physical phone, use the desktop LAN IP, for example ws://192.168.0.179:6768.
If the phone has a stale host entry, remove it from the app and pair again.
Development Paths
Android Phone
- Install Expo Go from Google Play
- Run
pnpm start, scan QR with Expo Go - For native modules:
pnpm exec expo run:android - Run with
pnpm start --dev-client
iOS Simulator
- Install Xcode from the App Store
- Run
pnpm start --iosto open in iOS Simulator
Physical Phone Debugging
The phone can be inspected through the connected device tooling:
orca snapshot --json
orca click --element @e3 --json
orca fill --element @e1 --value "ls" --json
orca screenshot --json
Use snapshot first to find the current element refs, then click/fill those refs. After mobile file edits, Metro usually hot reloads automatically, but navigating out of and back into the session screen can be useful because it re-runs terminal.subscribe.
Terminal Streaming Repro Without A Phone
Use this when terminal output does not render on device and you need to split server streaming bugs from WebView/UI bugs:
cd mobile
ORCA_MOBILE_WS_URL=ws://127.0.0.1:6768 pnpm exec tsx scripts/test-subscribe.ts <deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64>
You can pass a worktree selector as the third argument:
pnpm exec tsx scripts/test-subscribe.ts <deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64> "id:<worktreeId>"
pnpm exec tsx scripts/test-subscribe.ts <deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64> "path:/absolute/worktree/path"
pnpm exec tsx scripts/test-subscribe.ts <deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64> "name:my-worktree"
The expected result includes:
streamSawMarker: true
readSawMarker: true
If this repro fails, debug the desktop runtime/PTY path before the mobile WebView. If it passes but the phone is blank, debug the session screen or TerminalWebView readiness/queueing path.
Terminal Color Repro Without A Phone
Use this when terminal colors disappear after switching tabs. Open a Claude Code terminal and at least one other terminal in the target worktree, then run:
cd mobile
ORCA_MOBILE_WS_URL=ws://127.0.0.1:6768 pnpm exec tsx scripts/repro-terminal-colors.ts \
<deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64> "id:<worktreeId>"
The script captures terminal.subscribe snapshots in an A → B → A sequence and writes raw snapshots to mobile/terminal-color-repro/. If the two A snapshots have different sgrColor counts, the desktop snapshot changed during the switch. If they match, the ANSI color data is still present and the bug is in mobile replay/rendering.
Validation
Run these checks before committing mobile terminal changes:
cd mobile
pnpm exec tsc --noEmit
pnpm lint
cd ..
pnpm typecheck:node
Protocol Version Compatibility
Mobile and desktop talk over a versioned protocol. Because mobile updates lag desktop by 24-48h via the App Store, both sides exchange version numbers on status.get so a genuinely incompatible combo can hard-block instead of silently misbehaving.
Constants live in two files (Metro can't resolve outside mobile/):
src/shared/protocol-version.ts—DESKTOP_PROTOCOL_VERSION,MIN_COMPATIBLE_MOBILE_VERSIONmobile/src/transport/protocol-version.ts—MOBILE_PROTOCOL_VERSION,MIN_COMPATIBLE_DESKTOP_VERSION
Today all four are set so evaluateCompat always returns { kind: 'ok' } — nothing blocks. The wire format is in place to flip a switch when needed.
When to bump
Bump DESKTOP_PROTOCOL_VERSION (and the mobile mirror MOBILE_PROTOCOL_VERSION when relevant) for breaking changes:
- Removed RPC method or required parameter that mobile uses
- Changed meaning (units, nullability) of an existing field mobile reads
- Changed encryption, framing, or auth handshake
Do not bump for additive changes:
- New RPC methods
- New optional fields on existing methods
- New event types in
terminal.subscribe
Set MIN_COMPATIBLE_MOBILE_VERSION (kill-switch) when desktop ships a change that requires a minimum mobile version to function safely. Same for MIN_COMPATIBLE_DESKTOP_VERSION from the mobile side.
When a verdict is blocked, mobile/src/components/ProtocolBlockScreen.tsx renders a screen pointing the user at either the App Store (mobile too old) or GitHub Releases (desktop too old).
To exercise the block screen locally: set MIN_COMPATIBLE_DESKTOP_VERSION = 999 in mobile/src/transport/protocol-version.ts, rebuild, pair to any desktop. Revert before merging.
Mock Server
Develop the mobile app without a running Orca desktop instance:
pnpm mock-server # starts mock WebSocket server on port 6768
Connect from the app using endpoint ws://localhost:6768 and token mock-device-token.
Environment variables
MOCK_NATIVE_CHAT=1— serve the native-chat scenario (one live agent tab, empty transcript, image upload) instead of the default terminal fixtures.MOCK_SERVER_KEY_FILE— persist the server keypair across restarts so a paired device keeps its public-key pin. A missing or invalid file is re-keyed with a warning, which forces a re-pair.
Scenario control files
Read on every request, so behaviour can be flipped mid-session without a restart (a restart would re-key E2EE and force a re-pair). Write the mode into the file, or delete it for the default.
MOCK_SEND_MODE_FILE(defaultorca-mock-send-modein the system temporary directory) —accept(default) accepts the send,errorfails it withmobile_input_floor_unavailable, anything else reports the send as rejected.MOCK_TERMINAL_LIST_MODE_FILE(defaultorca-mock-terminal-list-modein the system temporary directory) —omitreturns an empty terminal list,otherreturns a list that omits the chat handle, anything else lists it.MOCK_TERMINAL_STREAM_MODE_FILE(defaultorca-mock-terminal-stream-modein the system temporary directory) —deadanswers a subscribe withsubscribedthenend(a gone PTY), which is what exercises the rearm bound and terminal prune; anything else streams normally.
Connecting to Real Orca
- Start Orca desktop with WebSocket transport enabled
- In Orca, go to Settings > Mobile and scan the QR code with this app
- The QR encodes the connection endpoint, device token, and TLS fingerprint
Project Structure
mobile/
├── app/ # Expo Router screens (file-based routing)
│ ├── _layout.tsx # Root layout with navigation stack
│ ├── index.tsx # Home screen — paired hosts list
│ └── pair-scan.tsx # QR code scanning screen
├── src/
│ ├── terminal/ # Terminal WebView and xterm bridge
│ └── transport/ # WebSocket RPC client
├── scripts/
│ ├── test-subscribe.ts # Desktop streaming repro without a phone
│ └── mock-server.ts # Standalone mock WebSocket server
└── assets/ # App icons and splash screen