Orca IDE vs CodeConnect Remote

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.

CodeConnect puts every coding-agent session running on your own computer into your hand. Works with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. Steer an agent mid-run, answer the permission prompt it is blocked on, review its diff, or take over its terminal outright. Your sessions travel directly between the app and the CodeConnect daemon on your own machine. No server sits in between, and your code never leaves your own devices. The single CodeConnect-operated service is a content-free push relay, described in full in the privacy policy. WHAT IT DOES • A fleet view. Every agent, what it is asking for, and how long it has been waiting. • Approvals that show the real command. Risk-tiered: a read is one tap, while a destructive command needs a deliberate hold and a biometric confirmation. The command is never truncated or faded, because a hidden suffix is exactly where a dangerous argument hides. • Codex, with its own options. A Codex request is answered with the choices Codex actually offered, including the exact scope of "don't ask again". Stop a running turn, or send a message that starts a turn when Codex is idle and joins the running one when it is busy. • Nothing decides without you. A prompt is held open until you answer it. If the daemon cannot be reached, the decision falls back to your keyboard rather than being silently answered on your behalf. • Diff review that works on a small screen. Unified, monospace, word-level highlighting, and a comment back to the agent on any hunk. • Talk to it. The compose bar stages text into the agent's prompt; template chips insert rather than send. Dictation is handled by the system speech recognizer, and a transcript is always staged for your review, never sent automatically. • A real terminal. Attach to the live session over the connection the app is already paired on, and take over completely. • It never lies about state. Every fact shows its age, a stale link disables actions and says why, and "answered at the keyboard" is a state the app renders rather than a guess. WHAT YOU NEED • A computer running macOS 13 or later, with the free CodeConnect daemon installed from codeconnect.sh (0.7.0 or later for Codex). Apple silicon and Intel are both supported. • tmux on that machine. • A network path from your phone to it — the same Wi-Fi, or any private network you operate. Tailscale is a common choice, and is optional. • iOS 17 or later. CodeConnect is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the vendors of the coding agents it supervises.