Your phone can reach your Mac by two different routes, and you choose which one a conversation uses when you start it. They are not better and worse versions of each other — one trades a little privacy for every feature, the other trades some features for keeping your work entirely between your own devices. Most people end up using both.
- Through Ripul
- Your phone and Mac meet in a relay room on Ripul’s servers. Nothing to set up, works from any network, and every feature is available.
- Direct
- Your phone opens a connection straight to the Mac over your own network. Your files, conversations and screen never touch our servers.
Through Ripul
This is the default, and for most people most of the time it is the right one. There is nothing to configure: sign in on both devices and they find each other. It works from a hotel, a train, a client’s guest Wi-Fi — anywhere either device can reach the internet — and every screen in the app works, because the relay can carry anything.
The trade is that your traffic passes through infrastructure we run. It is encrypted in transit, and we are not in the business of reading it, but it does leave your network.
Direct
Direct pairing cuts us out of the path entirely. Your phone talks to your Mac and nothing else is involved — on the same Wi-Fi at home or in the office, or from anywhere at all if you put both devices on Tailscale.
For work under an NDA, on a client’s codebase, or anywhere the answer to "where does this data go" has to be "nowhere", this is the answer. Your conversations are stored on the Mac, your files are read by the Mac, and the two devices speak to each other.
What Direct gives up
Being honest about this matters more than selling it, because the gaps are the kind you notice at the worst moment. Over Direct you get your agent conversations, file browsing, the Dock and full control of your Mac’s screen. You do not get:
- The terminal. Running commands on the machine goes through the relay, so Console is unavailable on a Direct connection.
- Processes — the same reason.
- The account-backed screens: plans, memories, artefacts, history and usage all live with your account rather than on the Mac.
- Collaboration. Inviting someone into a conversation needs a shared place for them to join, which is precisely what Direct removes.
- Push notifications, for the same reason — nothing is watching on your behalf while the app is closed.
Using Tailscale
On the same Wi-Fi, Direct needs no setup at all. To use it from anywhere else, both devices need to be on the same private network, and Tailscale is the least painful way to do that.
- Install Tailscale on the MacSign in and leave it running. This is the device that has to be reachable.
- Install Tailscale on the phoneSign in with the same account so both devices join the same tailnet.
- Pair as normalNothing about pairing changes. The Mac is simply reachable now whether you are at home or not.
How Direct is protected
A connection that bypasses our servers also bypasses everything our servers would have checked, so the Mac does the checking itself.
- The connection is TLS 1.3, and the phone proves itself with a challenge-response against a device credential rather than sending anything reusable.
- That credential is generated on the device, stored in the Keychain, and deliberately excluded from iCloud — it cannot follow you to another phone.
- The Mac validates every single operation against its own allowlist, independently of what the app’s interface offers. A paired phone is not a trusted phone.
- Pairing is revocable from the Mac at any time, and a forgotten device has to start over.