02 / HOW IT WORKS

9 digits, one tab, no install.

From the customer pressing Start to your technician seeing pixels: about three seconds, four control-plane hops, one media path.

01 ON THE IPHONE

Customer opens the iOS app and presses Start.

The end user has no account. The app is free. They tap once, get a 9-digit code keyed to your workspace, and read it to the technician, or paste it into the email/chat thread already open.

Your one-time code
428 · 901 · 736
Expires in 53s
Connected
02 IN THE BROWSER

Technician pastes the code. The server claims a slot.

The technician is already signed in to your workspace: auth and any 2FA happened at the door, not at the code entry. Pasting the code POSTs to the API with the existing session cookie, the server checks workspace membership, and hands back an HMAC-signed signalling token for that one session.

acme.anchorgrid.io/pair
Enter pairing code
4 2 8 9 0 1 7 3 6
Signed in · Acme support
03 IN THE NETWORK

ICE picks the shortest path.

Both sides exchange candidates over the WebSocket signalling channel. We always try peer-to-peer first. If the customer's network blocks it, we fall back to a TURN relay in Ashburn without dropping the session.

ICE negotiation · 320 ms
host host 192.168.1.42 → 192.168.1.10 LAN · 7 ms
srflx srflx 203.0.113.4 → 198.51.100.9 WAN · 42 ms
relay turn-ash-1.anchorgrid.io TURN · 86 ms
Chosen: host-host · LAN · all other candidates discarded.
04 IN THE SESSION

Pixels, audit trail, and an honest read on the path.

The technician sees the iPhone live. Every join, leave, and path change is written to the workspace audit log. View-only: Apple's sandbox prohibits remote touch.

RTT 42 ms · loss 0.00% · P2P · LAN
02.06 / TIMING

Three seconds, roughly.

Pair-to-first-frame on a healthy LAN sits in the low single seconds. WAN P2P adds the ICE round-trip and a renegotiation if a TURN candidate wins.

01
Pair code submitted
POST · session cookie already set
02
Signalling token minted
workspace check · HMAC-derived token
03
WebSocket + ICE
STUN candidates; TURN if needed
04
First media frame
DTLS handshake, AES-GCM keys
02.07 / ON DEVICE

What the iPhone actually publishes.

Screen frames

ReplayKit broadcast extension at 30 fps, single hardware H.264 encoder, published straight from the extension. Frames are downscaled on-device before they touch the wire.

hardware-accelerated H.264
Audio · device microphone

A silent audio session keeps the broadcast extension alive in the background. It carries no user audio off the device.

local-only; never transmitted
Touch injection · none

iOS sandbox does not allow remote control. AnchorGrid is view-only by design; annotations and pointers ride on top of the technician's browser.

enforced by iOS