Practical answers about Hermes Fleet.

A native iPhone app for controlling Hermes Agent gateways you choose. It connects directly to your gateways, so fleet state, conversations, controls, and credentials stay between your phone and your Hermes infrastructure.

Yes. Fleet connects to gateways you supply and control. It does not ship with a maintainer endpoint or shared credentials, and it does not require an AIowa-hosted relay or shared operator account.

Register it in the Gateways tab by address and credentials, or use QR-assisted pairing. Multiple authentication strategies are supported, and you can register several gateways and switch between them. Prefer TLS-protected endpoints, especially outside trusted local networks.

An iPhone running iOS 26 or later (app deployment target: iOS 26.0).

There is no published minimum. Some features depend on methods exposed by the connected Hermes gateway version; unsupported capabilities fail closed (stay unavailable with an explicit state) rather than misbehaving.

None (no credential), session token, loopback token, or username + password (stored as one Keychain item). A fifth strategy name ("bearer token") exists in the app's vocabulary but is reserved for future gateway support and is not usable in this beta.

No, but your iPhone must reach the gateway over the network path used at setup: same LAN, VPN/overlay, or HTTPS tunnel. Local-network gateways need iOS local-network permission.

Rotate at the gateway, then edit the credential in the app (Gateways ▸ gateway ▸ edit) and re-test. Removing a gateway removes its stored credential and gateway-local cached data.

Yes: copy the built-in setup prompt (first-run gate or Settings ▸ Set Up Another Server) and send it to your Hermes agent. It inspects non-destructively, prefers existing supported configuration, never enrolls you in third-party services without asking, creates a scoped least-privilege credential, verifies end-to-end from your phone's network path, and replies with URL + username + password + method.

Needs You is known-items only: it lists already-observed actionable items — classified gateway authentication or configuration failures, plus attention observed in rooms this phone has opened. Unobserved rooms contribute nothing, so incomplete coverage is labeled "N known items" rather than reading as a complete (empty) inbox. There is no fleet-wide pending-action summary.

Active Now is real execution only. Working/thinking/using-tool states come from actual roster signals, and a recent worker heartbeat renders as "Recent worker activity" — never as executing. There is no fleet-wide execution telemetry, so unseen bots are not claimed to be idle.

Not necessarily. Not-yet-loaded bot counts, partial outages, and unclassifiable gateways display as unknown or partial — never as "0" or "all quiet". Unknown means Fleet does not have the fact yet, not that the fleet is empty or idle.

Continue is device-local: a recent-open index stored on this phone, at most 50 references with 30-day retention, pruned when gateways are removed or destinations tombstone. It is not synchronized across devices and implies nothing about other clients.

Partially, from cache. Cached conversation history is preserved for cold-start presentation, and fleet/conversation snapshots may be cached locally to make recently viewed screens useful during a temporary disconnect. There is no documented offline mode beyond this.

The Bots tab is a fleet-wide roster of every bot on every registered gateway, with the full bot lifecycle: create bots; edit name, display name, description, model/provider, SOUL, and Skills/Toolsets/MCP toggles; delete with confirmation. Organize the roster with sections, hide bots from the default view (they stay mentionable), and pin bots to the top. Bots have real avatars, including a generated-portrait workflow with preview and explicit confirm or discard. Bot Routines schedule bots on interval or time-of-day schedules.

They are intercepted and replaced with /compact. Each bot has one continuous canonical chat, and its context is never silently reset.

Mention autocomplete uses the fleet-wide roster and disambiguates duplicates: a bare name when it is unique, a gateway-qualified label when it is not (@researcher-mac vs @researcher-4090), and a short deterministic suffix only when the qualified label still collides. A mention identifies a teammate; dispatch happens through the agent, not the client.

Yes, via cross-gateway groups: create the room on the home gateway, invite on the target gateway, then register on the home gateway. Afterwards the two gateways exchange room traffic directly with each other — the iPhone is controller-only. Cross-gateway rooms are text-only; RoomLink does not carry attachments.

The gateway-to-gateway linking mechanism behind cross-gateway rooms. Fleet's RoomLink panel shows per-room negotiation state (with an honest unsupported reason when the gateway disables RoomLink), scoped peer grants with explicit TTL and revocation, route registration using the target's exact advertised capability catalog, linked-peer status, manual replay/replication, and authority takeover behind an explicit confirmation that names the previous authority.

Promotion continues the room on the promoting gateway at epoch + 1. It is only offered for a caught-up replica of a foreign authority and always requires explicit confirmation. Important: promotion does not fence the previous authority — Fleet cannot verify that the old writer has been externally fenced, so the operator must confirm the previous authority can no longer commit before taking over. A timeout, a disconnect, or a Stop operation is not sufficient proof of fencing.

Not guaranteed. A remote mention passes the bot's identity to the agent, but Fleet does not verify or carry the remote messaging route; delivery depends on gateway-side support. In cross-gateway rooms, the gateways exchange traffic directly.

No. The Kanban surface is intentionally read-only in the current client. Other management surfaces — cron, skills, Projects browsing, memory/learning graph browsing and supported mutations, connection-health details — depend on gateway support.

Not currently. Fleet is a native iPhone app; no Android, iPad, Mac, or Vision Pro version is documented.

None beyond what the app needs to run. Fleet does not include advertising identifiers, third-party analytics, or a Hermes Fleet account, and it does not operate a central service that receives gateway content. Gateway credentials and short-lived connection tokens are stored in the iOS Keychain; cached fleet and conversation snapshots are device-local. Attachments and message content go to the gateway you select, only when you explicitly submit them. If you use voice input, speech recognition runs on the device, and audio is not intentionally uploaded by Hermes Fleet.

Remove a saved gateway and Fleet removes its stored credential and gateway-local cached data. Deleting the app removes its local data, subject to iOS backup and device-management behavior. Data already sent to a gateway is controlled by that gateway's operator and must be deleted through the gateway's own controls.

Fleet is made by AIowa LLC and is open source under the MIT License at github.com/AIowa-LLC/hermes-fleet. For bugs and feature requests, use the GitHub issue tracker. Report security vulnerabilities privately per the repo's SECURITY.md — and never include credentials, private gateway addresses, pairing QR contents, or conversation transcripts in a public issue.