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Explanation

What the phone can reach, and why

The phone and the desktop reach sessions through separate routes, checked against each other at build time.

The phone and the desktop app reach the same sessions through two separate builds, not through the phone borrowing the desktop's own. Each is wired to a session independently: the desktop through the app's own internal channel, the phone over the network.

Turret holds the two in step at build time rather than by habit. Every capability the phone is meant to offer has to be named in its own list, and a capability left out fails the build outright. A missing entry never answers quietly once the app is running. The build refuses to finish instead.

Two features once shipped complete on the desktop, each with its own screens, routes and tests already passing. Both were briefly missing from the phone's own list regardless. A person reading the merge by eye caught it, not any check. The build was changed afterward to refuse a missing entry on its own.

Even so, the phone does not reach everything the desktop does. It has no route to a session's files: no file picker, and none of the conversation header's external-editor or Finder controls. It shows no debug card and no VFX project strip.

It has no route to the Gemini API key either. A phone reaches a session through a machine that already holds that key. It can neither see that key nor set it, the way Settings's own Gemini tab can from the desktop.

Each of those gaps sits on something only the desktop machine has: its own filesystem, its own editor, its own encrypted key. Wiring the phone to reach past that would mean handing that capability to a second machine, not extending a route that already exists.

See Settings for the Gemini tab's key controls, and Modes for what each mode's panes and tools cover on either surface.