Companion

Available on Google Play. The Android Companion is a free download, and iOS is coming soon.

Most lab notebooks assume you are sitting at a keyboard. Real lab work happens standing at a bench with gloves on, a gel in one hand and a timer running. The Companion exists for that moment. It is a small, focused app for iOS and Android that talks to your laptop, so a photo you take or a page you scan files itself into the correct experiment, and the things you need to check (what is due today, the steps of the method you are running, whether you are low on a reagent) are one tap away on the device already in your pocket.

Navigation at a glance

The Companion is built around four bottom tabs plus a center Capture button. The tabs stay visible on every screen so you can switch tasks without backtracking.

• Home. The glance surface. A greeting, a live status card (lab name and connection freshness), a Today section (overdue, today, upcoming tasks from the laptop), a Tools launcher (Timers, Calc, Wiki, Sync), and a Recent list of your latest captures. The notification bell and settings icon live in the Home header.
• Notebook. Capture actions for the bench: Take a photo, Quick note, Scan a handwritten note, Upload from camera roll, and View method on phone. Sends use the NotebookChooser to route each item into the right notebook or experiment. The captured photo outbox (Inbox) appears below when photos are queued.
• Methods. Your full protocol library, browsable and searchable offline. See View a method on your phone for details on offline download, favorites, and the active-experiment recommendations band.
• Inventory. Scan a package barcode to receive, deduct, or reorder. See Inventory scanning.

The center button in the tab bar is a Capture action, not a tab. Tapping it opens the Notebook capture surface so you can shoot a photo or scan a page directly, without first switching to the Notebook tab. Calc, Timers, and Wiki are also reachable but are launched from the Home hub Tools launcher, not from the tab bar.

Home hub in detail

The Home tab is the starting point every time you unlock your phone at the bench. Its contents update on focus and reflect your live lab state.

• Greeting and status card. A time-of-day greeting using your first name (stripped from the paired display name), next to a pill showing the lab name, connection state (Live / Offline / Idle), and last-synced freshness.
• Active experiments band. When the laptop has an open experiment, a scrollable strip appears so you can tap straight into its method.
• Running timer. When a Companion timer is active, a live countdown card appears here. Tap it to jump to the Timers screen.
• Today. Overdue tasks surface at the top in red, today's scheduled tasks below in blue, and upcoming tasks in amber. The count of due items shows next to the label.
• Tools launcher. Four tiles: Timers (bench countdown), Calc (lab calculator), Wiki (the ResearchOS help docs), and Sync (force a fresh pull from the laptop). All four are reachable with one tap.
• Recent. The last three captures from your outbox, each showing its caption and send status (Queued, Sending, Sent, Failed). Hidden when the outbox is empty.

Today panel

The Today panel is a full-screen overlay that opens from the Today button in the Notebook tab's header. The button shows an amber count badge when tasks are due or overdue. The panel slides down over the screen and can be dismissed with a swipe or a tap on the scrim. It is not a pull-down of the Notebook body. See Today glance for the three stat tiles and task rows it contains.

The five things it does at the bench

The Companion is deliberately small. It does the handful of things that are genuinely better on a phone than on a laptop, and it sends each result back to the laptop where the rest of your notebook lives.

• Capture and route a photo. Take or upload a photo, caption it, and file it straight into an experiment's Lab Notes or Results. See Capture and route.
• Scan a handwritten page. Scan a notebook page and the handwriting becomes searchable text on the laptop. See Scanning handwritten notes.
• Glance at today. Open the Today panel to see what is scheduled, overdue, and coming up. See Today glance.
• Read a method. Browse your offline method library or open the method for the experiment you are running. See View a method on your phone.
• Track inventory. Barcode-scan to count stock down, see what is low, and receive a delivery. See Inventory scanning.

Get the app

On Android, install the Companion from Google Play. On iOS it is still a dev-client build while the App Store listing is pending. Once you have the app on your phone, the only setup is a one-time pairing to a laptop running ResearchOS, covered on the Pairing page. There is no shared notebook password to type into the phone. Pairing uses device keys, while account authorization and plan eligibility are separate requirements. Follow the authorization steps shown by your app version.

If you want to see what the app does before pairing a real laptop, the pairing screen offers a Try the demo path. It runs the app against sample data with a fake pairing, so you can walk through capture, scanning, today, methods, and inventory with no laptop in the loop.

Why your captures stay private

The Companion talks to the laptop through a relay server, and how much that relay can read depends on what is passing through. Every snapshot the laptop sends to your phone, and every routing command your phone sends back (which experiment or tab a capture belongs in), is sealed end-to-end to your phone's own X25519 key with authenticated encryption, so the relay only ever holds ciphertext for those, not the key to open it.

A photo, quick note, or scanned page travels differently, because the laptop still has to read it to file it into your notebook. It goes to the relay over an encrypted connection and signed with your phone's device key, so the relay can verify it has not been tampered with, but the content itself sits there in readable form for that short hop. That is why we keep it there for as little time as possible. The moment the laptop pulls a capture off the relay, it is deleted from the relay entirely, so the relay is a hand-off point, never a second copy of your bench work.

And like the rest of ResearchOS, the Companion is local-first, so your captures, notes, and timers stay on the phone until you choose to send them, and the app keeps working when you are offline (a basement microscope room, a cold room, a spotty corner of the building).

Start here

New to the Companion? Pair your phone first, then work through the actions in whatever order matches your bench.

• Pairing, the one-time QR setup that links your phone to a laptop.
• Capture and route, photos that file themselves into the right experiment.
• Scanning handwritten notes, handwriting that becomes searchable text.
• Today glance, the full-screen panel of what is due.
• View a method on your phone, browse the offline library or read steps and log a variation at the bench.
• Inventory scanning, barcode-scan to track stock.