A coding agent in your pocket, with CRDTs smuggled in via WebView

What it does

Lody iOS is a third-party, community-built iPhone client for Lody, a service for collaborating with coding agents running on your own machines. You get native chat with streaming markdown rendering, word-level code diffs, remote workspace file browsing, and even a live iOS Simulator viewer streamed over WebRTC. It’s in open TestFlight beta and requires iOS 26 or later.

The interesting bit

The CRDT sync engine (Loro/Flock) runs inside a Swift-managed offscreen WKWebView, because the official Node/CRDT packages don’t bundle in Metro. Instead of fighting the bundler, they ship the WASM cores into a hidden WebView with a native watchdog probing every 2 seconds and hot-restarting on failure. It’s a hack, but an honest one — and it keeps real-time bidirectional sync working in the background.

Key highlights

• Hybrid architecture: React Native shell, but chat collection, composer, and diffs are native Swift/UIKit/CoreText via the LodyKit module — 60/120 fps chat with character-level fade-in during streaming
• Live Simulator streaming: H.264/MJPEG frames over WebRTC DataChannels, with touch and hardware controls (home, rotate, shake) in the nav bar
• Local-first data: SQLite projections for millisecond cold starts, credentials isolated in the iOS Keychain
• Bilingual (EN/zh-CN) with locale strings checked in CI and projected into native xcstrings catalogs
• Built largely by coding agents in about a week, with a detailed first-person write-up linked from the README

Caveats

• Explicitly unstable: APIs, sync behavior, and UI can change without notice, and builds may break existing session data
• Unaffiliated with the official Lody team — issues go to this repo, not upstream
• Agent conversation sync is manual history import, not automatic device-to-device mirroring; the Quick Tunnel is still required for simulator signaling

Verdict

Worth a look if you use Lody and want to monitor or nudge agents from your phone — the native chat rendering and simulator streaming are genuinely impressive. Skip it if you need stability or anything other than iOS 26+.