iOS & Android Apps

1. The plain browser

Scan the pairing QR (see Pairing Your Phone) and the panel opens right in the phone's browser - monitoring, lighting, media, and controls, with nothing installed. When you are away from home, browser sessions ride the same end-to-end encrypted relay as the apps.

On your local network, a browser session runs in a fallback mode. Browser sessions are also deliberately short-lived - they expire after about a day, while app sessions last much longer between uses.

2. What the companion apps add

The iOS and Android apps host the same panel, with these differences:

• End-to-end encryption on the local network. The apps trust exactly one key: the certificate your PC generated, pinned at pairing. No other certificate is accepted for your PC.
• Long-lived sessions. An app session stays valid for weeks of idle time instead of expiring daily.
• Camera capture. The panel's Camera widget can turn your phone into a wireless webcam for the PC; where a browser cannot capture the camera, the panel prompts Open this panel in the Nexus app to use the camera.

3. Phone as a webcam

Add the Camera widget to the phone panel and start it, and the phone's camera streams to the PC as a webcam. Camera streaming requires a local network connection - it is not available over the relay. The widget lets you switch cameras and pick resolution and codec in its settings.