DSH Mobile 0.8.0: Android client for DeepSeek Harness without cloud or FCM

⚡ The gist in 5 seconds

• DSH Mobile 0.8.0 is a native Android client for DeepSeek Harness: agent chats from the computer open on the phone without a cloud server or FCM.
• Connection goes over home Wi-Fi, Tailscale, or your own relay; the DSH web port is not exposed externally. Requires Android 8.0+ and the 0.7.0 plugin for Windows.
• The project is unofficial, code under MIT: sessions, provider keys, and tools stay on the PC.

🔍 What happened

An author under the nickname pavel-logachev posted a breakdown of his project DSH Mobile — an Android client for DeepSeek Harness (DSH) — on Habr. The 0.8.0 app installs on Android 8.0 and newer, targetSdk 36; a 0.7.0 plugin is installed on a Windows computer. Of the DSH versions themselves, 0.2.0-rc.2 and 0.2.1-alpha.1 have been tested. The project has no affiliation with DeepSeek, and the code is open under MIT.

Here's how it works. The Node.js plugin is loaded into the DSH process and calls its own controllers — ctx.sessionController with the operations list, create, prompt, cancel, page, and follow. It does not parse the web interface, does not export the browser token, and does not spin up its own agent runtime. Externally, there is a narrow HTTPS API plus SSE with authentication, only for paired devices. The phone interface is native: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material 3, no web-page wrapper.

New features are declared as flags next to hostVersion in GET /v1/capabilities: steer, queue, rename, models, questions, questionSkip, attachments, fileDownload, and a separate notifications block. Older app versions simply ignore the flags. The adapter is enabled only when the owner has explicitly specified a DSH version from the list of tested ones — there is no auto-detection. The plugin takes projects from the DSH workspace registry in sidebar order; the first 100 are considered.

One separate rule: the phone never blindly repeats commands. If delivery is not proven, the user sees it on screen. Closing the screen means the end of observation, but it does not cancel the work on the computer.

🧠 Our take

Why a plugin instead of just "opening the web interface in a browser." In the installed DSH 0.2.0-rc.2, the browser authenticates with a cookie tied to the host address and derived from the launch token; the author found no separate mechanism for a mobile client. Our assessment: this is not a DeepSeek feature, but a workaround for a gap in mobile authentication. The stdio SDK option was ruled out for a different reason — it spins up a separate runtime, while the same chats open on the PC are needed.

What this changes. For those running a local agent, the usual question is how to reach it from the phone without exposing a port to the internet. Tailscale or your own relay solves this without cloud or accounts. What appeals to me here is not the transport but the rule about command delivery: most chat clients silently repeat a request on disconnect, while this one shows the state. For an agent with tool access, that matters more than pretty animations.

Who wins. The PC owner: keys and subscriptions never leave the computer. The loser is anyone expecting "install and it works": the DSH version must be declared manually, the plugin is Windows-only for now, and DSH itself is in a pre-release state. We believe the project will live exactly as long as the author is willing to update the plugin for every change to DSH internals.

⚠️ What we don't know

No latency measurements, no description of how exactly notifications arrive without FCM, and no independent security audit of the relay. All of this comes from a single author's article; there is no second confirmation. It's worth testing yourself how the channel behaves when Wi-Fi drops and what exactly ends up in the command log on the computer.

Forecast: within a quarter, the plugin will need at least one update for a new DSH build: the adapter is pinned to the list of tested versions, and DSH itself is still at 0.2.x.

Disclaimer: the project is unofficial, all data comes from a single author's article; compatibility with DSH versions has been confirmed only by them.

Source: Habr