Rime Remote

What it is

Rime Remote is an Android app for the agent sessions on your Rime computers. It lists every session on each computer you pair, the ones that need you first. You can watch a session’s live terminal, reply when it is waiting (typed, spoken through Android’s own recogniser, or as a photo or file), and pause, resume, interrupt or stop it. You can also start a new one in any project, with its own worktree.

Everything runs on the computer. The phone only shows and sends.

It cannot approve anything that needs root. The phone shows what is waiting at the machine, and can revoke permissions already given, but the approval itself is always made at the computer, with your password. There is no setting that changes this.

Install it

You need Android 9 or later. Download the APK from Rime Remote’s release in a browser on the phone, and let the browser install apps when Android asks.

Before you install it, you can check it came from Rime’s build. On any machine with the Android build tools:

sha256sum rime-remote-*.apk
apksigner verify --print-certs rime-remote-*.apk

The first line must match the SHA-256 on the download page. The certificate digest apksigner prints must be

9b2418f3cd37ba2ae83cdaeec5068280e02dc64135fdb1bb9fcb247326a66c67

which is the fingerprint Rime publishes in android/signing-certificate.sha256. Every Rime Remote release is signed with that key, and Android refuses an update signed by any other, so this check matters most for the first install.

Updates

Each time it starts, the app asks GitHub for Rime Remote’s releases. When a newer one is out it says so, and Update downloads it, checks it against its published SHA-256 and hands it to Android’s installer.

Pair it with a computer

1. On the computer, open Settings › Devices › Pair a device. It shows a code.
2. In the app, tap Add a computer and scan the code. If the camera can’t, run rime remote pair --text on the computer and use Paste a code instead on the phone.

A code works once, for three minutes. Scanning it pins that computer’s key on the phone, and the phone makes a key of its own for that computer alone, kept in Android’s keystore behind your fingerprint or screen lock. You can pair several computers.

The app keeps nothing else: no transcripts, no scrollback, no history, and it is excluded from Android’s backups.

How it reaches the computer

On the same network, the phone connects to the computer directly, if you let it in:

sudo rime firewall allow rime-remote

Otherwise, and away from home, it goes through Rime’s relay. The connection is end-to-end encrypted either way (Noise, X25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305). The relay is run by the Rime project. It carries encrypted bytes it cannot read, but it does see both addresses, when you connect and how much data moves. The app shows which path a connection took.

Notifications

To be told when an agent is waiting for you, needs a permission decision, finishes or fails, install a UnifiedPush distributor such as ntfy on the phone. Rime Remote uses no Google services. Each notification carries a few encrypted numbers; its text is written on the phone.

Agents started from the phone

An agent you start from the phone runs on the computer and keeps going when you put the phone away. By default it pauses while the computer’s screen is locked. To keep it running:

rime agent lock --remote continue

Take a phone off

Forget in the app removes the computer from the phone, but the computer still trusts that phone. To revoke it, on the computer:

rime remote devices
rime remote revoke <device>

Revoking takes effect at once.

Turn Rime Remote off

Rime Remote’s service, rime-remoted, runs in every account and keeps one connection open to the relay. To turn it off for your account:

systemctl --user disable --now rime-remoted

It also starts Rime’s agent runtime. If you still want agent sessions, or Closing the lid to keep working, run rime agent enable.