Phone Relay

Answer decisions and approvals from your phone, without exposing your machine

Phone relay lets you keep the factory moving while you're away from your desk. Pair a phone once, and Fabrika's decisions, plan approvals, reviews, and audits land in your pocket — with a Web Push when something needs you.

The factory runs on your machine, but the judgment calls are yours. Phone relay forwards just those calls — the attention feed — to a decision-focused web app on your phone, so you can approve a plan or answer a question from anywhere.

How it works

Your machine never opens a port to the internet. Instead, the Fabrika daemon dials out to the hosted relay at relay.fabrika-ai.com and holds a single connection open. Your phone connects to the same relay, and the relay pipes the two together.

Fabrika daemon ──(outbound connection)──▶ relay.fabrika-ai.com ◀──(connection)── your phone

Because the daemon initiates the connection, relay works behind NAT, firewalls, and home routers with no port forwarding, no VPN, and nothing exposed on your machine.

The relay is a zero-knowledge pipe: everything between your daemon and your phone is end-to-end encrypted, so the relay only ever routes ciphertext (see How it’s secured below).

Getting access

The relay is a hosted service in early access. To get a relay token, email berkay@berkaycubuk.com. You’ll receive a token that authorizes your daemon to connect.

Setup

Open Settings → Phone relay in the cockpit.

1. Enter the relay token you received by email. The Portal URL is pre-filled with relay.fabrika-ai.com — leave it as is.
2. Toggle Enabled on and click Save & reconnect. The status pill turns to Connected once the daemon establishes its tunnel.
3. Click Show pairing QR. (The relay must be connected first.)

Each project’s daemon connects on its own, so you set up phone relay per repo.

Pairing a phone

With the relay connected, click Show pairing QR and scan the code with your phone’s camera.

• Scanning opens the relay’s phone app and completes an end-to-end-encrypted pairing in one step.
• Each QR code works once and expires after 5 minutes. Generate a fresh one if it lapses.
• The pairing secret travels inside the QR’s URL fragment, which never reaches the relay server — only your phone reads it.

Paired phones appear under Paired devices with their last-seen time. Remove a device there to unpair it instantly and drop its push subscriptions — it’ll need a new QR to reconnect.

What you can do from your phone

The phone is for judgment and kicking off work, not full operations. From the attention feed you can:

Some surfaces are deliberately not exposed to the phone: live agent sessions, in-flight steering, settings, fabrika.toml edits, and file uploads all stay on your desktop. The phone covers the four things that are truly yours — approve, decide, accept, ship.

Notifications

When something newly needs you — a fresh decision, a plan ready to approve, a task entering review, or an auto-merge flagged for audit — the daemon sends a Web Push straight to your paired phones.

• Pushes are debounced: a plan that fans out into ten review-ready tasks buzzes you once, not ten times.
• If a phone is already attached and you’re looking at the feed, the push is suppressed — no redundant buzz.
• The payload only ever says “Fabrika — needs your attention.” The details never leave your machine; you open the app to see them.

How it’s secured

Phone relay is built so the relay server in the middle learns nothing about your work.

• End-to-end encryption. Every phone session is encrypted directly between your daemon and your phone using an authenticated handshake. The relay forwards opaque ciphertext and never holds a key that could decrypt it.
• Zero-knowledge relay. The relay sees only routing metadata — which daemon, which session, how many bytes — never task contents, decisions, or code.
• One-time pairing. Pairing secrets are single-use, expire in 5 minutes, and ride in the QR’s URL fragment, so they never touch the relay server.
• Minimal push payloads. Push notifications carry no task details — just a generic “needs attention” nudge.
• Revocable at will. Unpair any phone from Paired devices, or toggle the relay off entirely, and remote access stops immediately.

This is consistent with Fabrika’s stance overall: the binary makes no network connections except to the agents, git remotes, and — only if you enable it — the relay you configure.