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Control Center

Pair a device

This guide shows you how to pair a phone with Control Center, so you can read messages and tickets and reply from anywhere. See Remote control and mobile for how the link works and its security model.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • The desktop app running, and a workspace set up.
  • The Remote companion app. By default Control Center pairs with remote.usectrl.dev. Point the phone app host setting at it. (You can also self-host, see below.)
  • A signaling broker reachable from both devices: a wss:// endpoint that relays only the connection handshake. Note its URL.
  • One or more STUN servers (e.g. stun:stun.l.google.com:19302). Control Center uses STUN only, and there is no TURN relay by design.

Self-hosting. Remote and the broker are open source in this repo: the phone app (apps/cc_remote, a Flutter web PWA you can deploy to Cloudflare Worker) and the signaling broker (apps/cc_signaling_server, a single stateless Dart binary that holds no app data and never sees the pairing secret). See their READMEs for build and run steps.

Step 1: Configure the transport

Section titled “Step 1: Configure the transport”

Open Settings → Remote control and fill in three values:

Field What to enter
Signaling broker URL Your wss:// broker endpoint
Phone app host The Remote app origin the QR points phones at (remote.usectrl.dev by default)
STUN servers Comma-separated stun: URLs

Turn on Start on app launch if you want the listener to come up automatically; when it’s off, the listener stays stopped until you start it.

Step 2: Start the listener

Section titled “Step 2: Start the listener”

Start the listener from the same section. While it’s running you’ll see “Listening for devices”; the desktop is now holding a room open on the broker and waiting for a phone.

Step 3: Show the pairing code

Section titled “Step 3: Show the pairing code”

Open Settings → Devices and click Pair a device. A QR code appears, encoding a short-lived deep link (it expires in about five minutes).

Scan it with your phone’s camera, or click Copy link and open it in a browser. The phone loads the PWA, stores the pairing record locally, and strips the secret from the URL, so the PWA host never sees it.

Step 4: Approve the device

Section titled “Step 4: Approve the device”

The moment the phone authenticates, the desktop dialog swaps its action from Close to Approve device. Click it to finish pairing.

The device now appears in the Paired devices list with a live status dot: active when its connection is up, pending when it’s waiting.

Manage paired devices

Section titled “Manage paired devices”

From Settings → Devices you can:

  • Approve a device that’s waiting
  • Revoke a device you no longer trust. Its secret is destroyed, so it fails closed on reconnect

Revoking is the right move for a lost or replaced phone. It’s immediate and irreversible from the device’s perspective.

Switch workspaces from the phone

Section titled “Switch workspaces from the phone”

A paired phone can switch between workspaces independently of the desktop. The phone’s workspace selection changes only its own view, never what the desktop shows. Every call the phone makes is scoped by that selection, so it can’t reach another workspace by passing a foreign id.

Section titled “Related guides”