Cua Spaces on your phone

Follow your agents from an iPhone or iPad: start a task on one of your computers, read the thread, answer approvals, review changes and watch the desktop.

The Cua Spaces phone app shows your Spaces grouped by the computer they run on. Each Space opens as a conversation with its agents. You can start a task, send a message, answer an approval, look at what changed, and open the live desktop of a Space. Nothing runs on the phone itself: the work stays on your computers.

The phone app is a separate product from the desktop apps. What your computers do for it is an experiment called mobile, and it is off until you turn it on.

Turn it on#

On each computer that should answer your phone:

cua experiments enable mobile

You can also use Settings, Advanced, Labs once the experiment is on. While it is off, the computer does not answer a phone's requests and does not report events for alerts. The experiment is the same switch the other experiments use: CUA_EXPERIMENTS=mobile turns it on for one process.

Open the app and sign in with your Cua account. The phone adds itself to your account, the same way another computer does, and your computers appear in the list. A computer that is off or asleep shows as offline, and the last thread you read stays on the phone, sealed, so you can read it without a connection. Messages and answers you write offline wait in an outbox and are sent once, in order, when the computer is back.

The app asks for Face ID, Touch ID or the phone's passcode when it opens, when it comes back after a minute away, and before it opens the desktop of a computer if you last unlocked more than five minutes ago, so a stolen, unlocked phone is not instant access. It is on by default; Settings, Privacy turns it off. A phone with no passcode cannot be asked anything, and Settings says so.

What you can do#

Start a task: write the job, pick an agent and the computer it runs on, and optionally a repository. The computer makes the Space.
Follow a thread: messages, short rows for the agent's tool calls, and the status of each agent.
Answer approvals: Allow, Allow for this Space when the computer says it can be remembered, or Decline. When several wait, the card says how many.
Queue or steer a running agent: a message while it works either waits its turn or interrupts it.
Review changes: the changed files, a unified or word diff, and a preview of images and text.
Dictate a message with the phone's own speech recognizer. No Cua server transcribes it.
Watch the desktop of a Space in the viewer.

A phone cannot run up your computer or a bill. At most three tasks start at once, twenty an hour, and three new agent homes a day per account. A task from a phone does not start where a linked cloud could be billed unless you allow it on the computer with CUA_PHONE_MAY_SPEND=on. "Allow for this Space" lasts a day; after that the same request asks again. Approvals for pushes, sign-ins, joins and abilities are never remembered.

Watching and controlling a desktop#

A computer that shares its desktop shares it as a Space, and the phone opens it like any Space, with the same roles the desktop app uses. Your own phone may look and touch. A teammate you shared it with may do what their share allows: a viewer only looks. There is no extra question on the phone or the computer: sharing the desktop is the permission. The live desktop in the viewer is view only until you take control in the app.

What a phone never reaches is the computer underneath: it cannot run a command, read or write a file, open a tunnel, shut the computer down or create Spaces on it, whatever it is allowed in a Space. When you stop sharing the desktop, a phone that is watching it stops within a second.

A computer needs the latest Cua Spaces to be used from a phone. The relay does not send a phone's calls to one that predates phones, and the phone says "update it". What widens a Space's reach (an ability for a home Space, an agent asking to join) is answered on the computer, not from a phone. "Allow for this Space" from a phone lasts a day and names the phone that gave it.

To make a computer answer no phone at all:

cua-spacesd phone off
cua-spacesd phone on

To remove one phone, remove it from the Computers list: that ends its sessions, its viewer tickets and its alerts. To remove every phone of your account at once, use Remove all phones in the app's Settings (it asks for Face ID or the passcode, and a recent sign-in). Resharing or removing a computer from a phone also needs a sign-in made in the last ten minutes, and a phone never adds a computer. What phones did is a line each in the log (cua-spacesd phone audit), and the computer's access log names the phone and whether it looked or touched.

Alerts on a closed app#

An alert is sent when an agent needs you or finishes. It says only that, with the agent's name: never message text, tool output or file content. Alerts need the relay that connects your account to be set up for them.

If you run your own relay, turn alerts on with CUA_RELAY_PUSH=on and give it the Apple push key through CUA_PUSH_APNS_KEY_FILE, CUA_PUSH_APNS_KEY_ID and CUA_PUSH_APNS_TEAM_ID. Keep the key out of the image and out of source control. A relay without CUA_RELAY_PUSH=on behaves exactly as it did before: the push routes answer 404, and the viewer is handled as it always was. The same setting also lets the phone's web view open the viewer, with the relay serving the viewer page itself inside a sandbox. See the relay README for the full list and a deploy checklist.

Build it yourself#

The app is in apps/cua-spaces-mobile (React Native with Expo and a Rust core). Its README.md explains how to build it for the Simulator, and docs/SETUP.md lists what a release needs: an OAuth client for the phone, an Apple developer account, and the push key.