Orca IDE vs Hermex

Orca Mobile is the companion app for Orca, the open-source agentic coding workspace for macOS, Linux, and Windows. Pair your iPhone to your desktop in seconds and pick up a terminal session from the couch, the kitchen, or across the office. WHAT IT DOES • Live mirror of your desktop terminal, including running AI agent sessions (Claude Code, Codex, custom CLIs). • Full keyboard input — type, tab-complete, Ctrl-C, scroll back, all from the phone. • Multi-worktree, multi-terminal: jump between projects with a tap. • Phone-fit zoom and a smart on-screen keyboard with quick Ctrl/Alt accessory keys and shortcuts. • Background long-running commands and get a notification when a TUI goes idle (e.g. when Claude finishes thinking). HOW IT WORKS Orca Mobile is a thin client. Nothing runs on your phone except the viewer. Your code, your shells, your AI agents — all of that stays on your desktop. The phone shows you what's happening and forwards your keystrokes back over an encrypted local-network connection. Pairing is end-to-end encrypted. Your desktop generates a one-time keypair and shows a QR code; you scan it from the app. After that, all traffic between phone and desktop is sealed with that pair's keys. PRIVACY • No analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no third-party SDKs of any kind in the iOS app. • Pairing tokens and your preference list live in the app's own sandbox. The app's traffic to your desktop is end-to-end encrypted on your local network only. • The Orca desktop app collects anonymized usage metrics per the policy at https://www.onorca.dev/privacy. The mobile app itself does not. • Open source: every line is auditable at https://github.com/stablyai/orca. REQUIREMENTS • An iPhone (iOS 16+) on the same Wi-Fi as your desktop. • The Orca desktop app, free, from https://www.onorca.dev/ or https://github.com/stablyai/orca/releases.

Hermex is a native iPhone client for your self-hosted Hermes Agent server. It is designed for people who already run a reachable Hermes Web UI server and want a focused mobile way to keep up with agent work from iPhone. Connect to your own server, open existing sessions, start new conversations, and follow streamed responses as they arrive. Manage Kanban boards and cards, review status-focused work, update workflows, add comments, inspect history, and preview or launch Dispatcher runs. The app also supports model/profile/reasoning controls, file and photo attachments, workspace file browsing, tasks, skills, memory, usage details, and a share extension for staging content from other iOS apps. Agent execution happens on the configured Hermes server, not on the iPhone. Prompts, attachments, shared content, workspace requests, board and card actions, and session actions are sent only to the server URL you enter. Recent sessions and messages may be cached locally for offline read-only viewing, and the cache can be cleared from Settings. Hermex does not provide a hosted Hermes backend, in-app account creation, subscriptions, or in-app purchases. You need your own reachable Hermes Web UI server to use the app. Not affiliated with Nous Research.