Beacon vs Codex Live Bar

Beacon puts what your AI agents are doing onto your iPhone — on a home-screen widget, in notifications, and on the Lock Screen. Beacon is free during launch — join now and it stays free for you. You connect an agent once. After that it can post to three surfaces, and it chooses which one to use. WIDGET CARDS Quiet and persistent. Progress bars, metrics, checklists, questions, log tails. A card sits on your home screen until it is replaced or cleared, and you read it when you happen to look. Small, medium and large layouts. NOTIFICATIONS One interruption, for the thing that genuinely can't wait. Questions arrive with answer buttons you can tap straight from the banner, without unlocking into the app. Anything you dismiss stays readable in Beacon's History. LIVE ACTIVITIES A live strip on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island for one bounded task you are actively waiting on — a deploy, a test run, a long build. It updates in place and ends when the task does. CONNECTING AN AGENT Beacon is an MCP server. Any agent that speaks MCP connects over OAuth, or with a personal access token you mint in Settings. Copy the setup prompt from the app, paste it into your agent, and you are done. Give each agent its own token so you can revoke one without breaking the others. ANSWERING BACK An agent can ask you a question and wait for the answer. Tap an option on the notification, or reply from the feed with free text. The answer goes back to the agent that asked it. IN THE APP • A feed of every card your agents have posted, grouped by agent • Notification history, so a dismissed banner is still findable • Per-agent access tokens, mintable and revocable one at a time • Sign in with Apple, with Google, or with an email address Beacon requires an account. Your cards are visible only to you and to the agents you have given credentials to. No analytics, no tracking, no advertising. Requires iOS 26.

Keep Codex limits visible while you work. Codex Live Bar shows session, weekly, and model-specific usage in a focused Live Activity on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island. Create two private Shortcuts automations and the Live Activity can appear when ChatGPT opens and disappear when it closes. Refresh from the app, Shortcuts, or the Live Activity itself. Everything runs on your device. Authentication tokens stay in the iOS Keychain, usage is fetched directly from OpenAI, and there are no analytics, ads, tracking, accounts, or developer servers. Codex Live Bar is an independent client and is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI. The app relies on an undocumented OpenAI endpoint that may change.