Help Center

Connect Big Smooth to your Mac

Big Smooth on your phone is a remote for the agent running on your Mac — reach it through your Smoo account, or straight over your own network.

Big Smooth is a personal agent that lives on your Mac. The phone app is its control surface: it does not run the agent, it talks to the one you already have running, so the first thing to get right is how the phone reaches that machine.

There are two ways in. The Smoo Relay brokers the connection through your Smoo account, so it works from anywhere with no tailnet and no port forwarding. A direct connection points at the machine itself on your LAN or tailnet — faster, and the only mode that can show Stats.

How to

  1. 1

    Start Big Smooth on your Mac and make sure it is signed into the same Smoo account you use on your phone.

    The relay matches phone to Mac by account. A daemon signed into a different account will not appear in your list.

  2. 2

    On the phone, open Settings and tap "Continue with Smoo".

    Sign-in opens in your browser (Google, SSO or email), not inside the app, so your existing session and password manager work normally.

  3. 3

    Pick which Mac to talk to under "Big Smooth" in Settings.

    With one daemon online the app selects it for you. With several, you choose — and the choice is remembered for next launch. Switching machines starts a fresh transcript, because conversations are stored per daemon.

  4. 4

    For a direct connection instead, add one under Settings → Direct.

    A name, the base address (e.g. smoo-hub.tailc13b5a.ts.net:8443 — https:// is assumed if you leave the scheme off), and the daemon token. Tokens are stored in the device keystore, never in a backup-visible file.

  5. 5

    Tap "Test connection" before you save a direct target.

    It probes the daemon and tells you both whether it answered and whether your token opened it — the two failures that otherwise look identical.

If something goes wrong

"No Big Smooth is running."
The relay is up and you are signed in, but no daemon is dialed into your account. Open Big Smooth on your Mac. If it is already open, check it is signed into the same Smoo account, then tap Retry.
A machine you expect is missing from the list.
The peer list is a 90-second liveness window, not a saved roster — a Mac that just woke can take a moment to reappear. Tap Refresh rather than restarting the app.
"<your Mac> is offline."
The machine you were addressing dropped off the relay. The app removes it from the list rather than re-selecting it, so pick another Mac if you have one, or bring that one back and tap Retry.
"Can't reach Big Smooth."
The transport itself is down. The app re-dials on its own with an exponential backoff capped at 30 seconds, so this usually clears without help. On a direct connection, check the address in Settings; on the relay, check the phone's internet.
Test says "Reachable. Big Smooth isn't signed into Smoo AI."
Your token opened the daemon, but the daemon has no Smoo session of its own. It will still chat; anything that needs your Smoo account will not work until you sign it in on the Mac.
"That connection's address isn't valid."
The saved address is not a usable http/https URL. Edit the target and give it a host and port — a bare host:port is fine, a path or a ws:// URL is not.
"Relay isn't configured in this build."
A development build with no relay credentials compiled in. Use a direct connection, or install a release build.

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