expo app improvments

[danielehrhardt]

Phone app: faster, no more lag, and the desktop's features

The phone app now opens long chats instantly, scrolls smoothly, shows its lists at once on start, and does most of what the desktop does. I ran it in the iOS Simulator against a seeded test core. On Android it only bundles cleanly — I did not run it on a device.

Why it was slow and laggy

• Chats: 87 % of chat bytes in your real database are inline base64 screenshots (one message is 84 MB). The phone downloaded the whole chat, uncompressed, and again on almost every event.
• Streaming: the phone received the complete reply five times a second instead of only what changed.
• Lists: every avatar in every list ran two or three endless animations, including on tabs you weren't looking at. Agents was a plain scroll view that mounted every row.

Measured on the seeded test core (local)

Request	Before	Now
Long chat (180 messages, 90 screenshots), first screen	37 MB, 1.9 s	2 KB, 0.25 s
Task board (45 tickets)	95 KB	3 KB
Chat list (200)	51 KB	4 KB

The gap will be larger over Tailscale or the cloud relay.

Core changes

All opt-in; the desktop and older phone apps get the same answers as before.

• Message windows: a chat can be asked for its latest messages only, with older pages on demand.
• Light messages: screenshots become their own cached image requests and long tool output is cut.
• Compression: answers to phones and through the cloud relay are gzipped.
• Events: stored messages go only to phones that have that chat open.
• Task board: a summary mode leaves the long descriptions out.
• Bug fix: Approve on a ticket always failed from the phone, because the route wasn't allowed for phones. It works now.
• Phone allowlist: also adds follow-up controls, message pages and images, and the Android phone list and screenshot.
• Migration 85: an index for the latest runs.

Phone app changes

• Speed:
  • Chats open with the latest 40 messages and load earlier ones as you scroll.
  • Lists are saved on the phone and shown immediately on the next start.
  • Events patch the lists instead of refetching them.
  • Agents, Chats and Tasks are virtualized.
  • Only the streaming row re-renders while an answer arrives.
• Questions and approvals: one tap on an option, or Approve / Decline with a note, in the chat and on Home.
• Chat menu: rename, pin, archive, delete, pause. A scheduled follow-up can be run now, moved or cancelled.
• In the thread: follow-up and retry markers, plan checklists, compact file diffs, and screenshots that load when you open a step.
• New screens: archived chats (with the ones still going), archived tasks, all automations, and the activity of every agent.
• Tickets: open instantly from the board and show their timeline.
• Android phones: listed under Screens, watch-only.

What was checked

• Typecheck passes for the whole workspace and the phone app; the phone app has no linter installed.
• Core tests pass for the touched areas, run file by file, including new ones for windows, paging, light messages, the image route, gzip and the event fan-out.
• An independent review found 14 issues; all code fixes are in. The data-layer fixes are verified only by typecheck and by the simulator run, since the phone app has no tests.
• Simulator run: pairing, cold start from the saved lists, the long chat with paging, answering a question, the chat menu, ticket Approve, streaming, and the new screens.

Screenshots and the seed and measure scripts are in /Users/danielehrhardt/.godmode/agents/godmode/workspace/task-40-phone-app/.

Not done

• Controlling an Android phone from the app: that widens what a paired phone may do, so it is your call.
• Voice, a notifications inbox, the away summary, and spend/budgets.
• Schedules read "Next run tomorrow at 08:00" rather than "Weekdays at 08:30"; the wording helper lives only in the desktop code.
• The automatic test for the Android screenshot rule (below).

What you need to do

1. Review and merge. Main is merged in with no conflicts left; my migration moved to 85 because main took 84.
2. Update the desktop app after merging. The speed gains for chats need the new core; the new phone app still works against an older core, just without them.
3. Ship a new phone build (raise the iOS build number and Android version code) and try it on a real Android phone.
4. One rule to confirm: a paired phone gets a screenshot of an Android phone only when an agent or chat uses that phone, and can never control it. That rule has no automated test.

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Task #40 · done by Godmode with Godmode Bot