Getting started
Phones and tablets
What a phone does in a room, how much memory it can give, and how to keep it serving when it holds layers.
A phone can join any room. Usually it joins to ask: it sends questions and reads answers while the computers run the model. A phone alone can’t run a model, so start the room on a computer.
Join from a phone
Section titled “Join from a phone”Scan the room’s QR code with the camera, or open the invite link. See Invite devices.
You need:
- iPhone or iPad: Safari on iOS 26 or later. Older iOS can join to chat.
- Android: Chrome 121 or later.
Why phones usually only ask
Section titled “Why phones usually only ask”A phone’s GPU is much slower than a computer’s, and every device the answer passes through adds a Wi-Fi hop. So the room gives layers to the fastest devices first. A phone gets layers only when the computers don’t have enough memory. See How layers are split.
How much a phone can give
Section titled “How much a phone can give”The browser tab limits it, not the GPU.
0.5 GB by default, at most 1 GB.
| Phone memory | Most it can give |
|---|---|
| up to 2 GB | 0.5 GB |
| below 8 GB | 1 GB |
| 8 GB or more | 2 GB |
| not reported | 1 GB |
Keep a phone serving
Section titled “Keep a phone serving”If your phone does hold layers:
- Keep the room’s tab in front. A background tab can stall the whole room.
- Keep the screen on. Pooled tries to keep it awake. If it can’t, it says so: set Auto-Lock to Never on an iPhone, or the screen timeout to its longest on Android.
- Plug it in. Serving drains the battery fast.
If a phone locks or reloads
Section titled “If a phone locks or reloads”- Back within a minute: it reconnects and the answer carries on.
- Reloaded: it rejoins under the same name and gets its layers back.
- Gone for over a minute: the room deals its layers to the other devices and keeps going. This is the Re-deal on its own setting, on by default.
See Device drops and recovery for the details, and Benchmarks for phone speed measurements.