Phone companion

The phone companion records a meeting from your pocket (screen off, app in the background) and lets you take manual notes. Capture and local notes work today on Android. The phone never processes audio: transcription, speaker labelling, and summarisation all run on your desktop. The phone’s job is to capture audio and hand it across to one of your desktops.

Note

The phone finds your desktop through your account directory and syncs to it directly on the same network, or through the hosted relay otherwise. Until a signed-in desktop is reachable, a recording stays on the phone.

Note

Android first; iOS is coming soon. The phone companion is part of the connected tier (AUD$20/yr) and requires a Minutist desktop install on the same account.

Install

The phone companion is Android-only. iOS is coming soon; there is no iOS build or App Store listing yet.

Install it from the Google Play listing, or build it from the repository.

Requires Android 7.0 (API 24) or later.

Sign in

Note

Sign-in needs a Minutist account.

1. Open the phone app and tap Sign in on the sign-in screen.

2. The app shows a short code and opens a verification URL in your browser. Sign in to your Minutist account there and confirm the code.

3. Once authorised, the phone connects to your account. Devices already signed in to the same account are found automatically, with no manual step on the desktop.

Record a meeting

Tap New recording on the phone. You can lock the screen or switch apps; recording continues in the background via the Android foreground service.

No live transcript appears on the phone during capture. There is no feedback during the recording; only the audio file is produced. Transcription happens on a desktop, not the phone.

You can type manual notes during the meeting using the notes pane. The recording and your notes are stored on the phone.

When you tap Stop, the app finalises the recording. On Android 10 (API 29) and later it transcodes the captured AAC to 16 kHz mono Opus; on API 24–28 it keeps the original AAC (.m4a). The meeting is then queued for sync. The desktop decodes both formats (AAC-in-MP4 (.m4a) and Opus), so a phone recording transcribes once it has synced, regardless of which the phone produced.

Auto-sync after recording

After you tap Stop, the phone queues the recording and sends the audio and notes to one of your signed-in desktops on its own. While a transfer is in progress, a foreground notification keeps the transfer alive if you switch away from the app. If the transfer is interrupted, the phone retries when you reopen the app or when a new peer becomes reachable. A manual sync option remains as a fallback.

Once a desktop receives the recording it runs the pipeline: transcription, speaker labelling, and summarisation. The transcript and summary sync back to your phone.

Note

Retrying automatically in the background after a network drop (without reopening the app) is not done yet. For now, reopen the app to resume an interrupted transfer.

The phone finds your desktop through your account directory: a desktop on the same network syncs directly, and the hosted relay carries the transfer across other networks. Until a signed-in desktop is reachable, a recording stays on the phone.

Background recording permissions (Android)

Long recordings need the foreground service to stay active. If the OS kills it, the recording stops.

Android runs Minutist as a foreground service during recording. A persistent notification appears in the status bar while recording is active; this is required by the OS and cannot be hidden.

Keep these enabled to avoid interruptions:

• Battery optimisation: set Minutist to Unrestricted in Settings → Apps → Minutist → Battery.
• Background activity: confirm the app is not restricted under Settings → Apps → Minutist → App battery usage.

If the notification disappears mid-recording, the OS has killed the service. Set battery optimisation to Unrestricted and restart the recording.

Caution

Do not disable the foreground-service notification via notification settings; the OS will terminate the recording process if the notification is dismissed.

Privacy

Recording on the phone follows the same data path as the desktop once sync delivers the file:

• The audio syncs to one of your desktops over the end-to-end encrypted sync channel. The relay forwards ciphertext; it never holds or reads the audio.
• The desktop transcribes the audio locally. Nothing is uploaded to a speech service.
• If you use the MCP connector to share a meeting with Claude or Codex, that sends the meeting content to the AI provider, by design, and only when you choose to. That path is not private.

Until a signed-in desktop is reachable, the audio and notes you record stay on the phone. See Security for the full data-flow diagram.