More shells (mobile, native, hardware) — Phase 14 core topic (research + design)

Filed from the next-horizons discussion #1240, decided by Drew on 2026-11-05: all themes are planned. This issue is the core topic for More shells (mobile, native, hardware). Its job is research and design — broaden the idea beyond what is already understood, set up multiple next steps, and produce implementation plans. No implementation starts here; the output is design documents and implementation issues.

Drew's principles for everything in Phase 14 (from #1240, 2026-11-05)

• Local-first is always the goal, AND a hosted version is intended: central coordination supporting a large graph of broadly accessible objects.
• Anything built must be completely usable by others hosting a small or large server themselves. P2P-hosted worlds and data behave the same as a large hosted public server; differences live in backend scale elements and access controls.
• Users connect to each other and transfer/interact directly wherever possible, so hosted resources are an offloadable backstop, not a requirement. The app must not technically need us to function. Collaborative / shared / federated / local-first / p2p.
• Our hosted instance is essentially public; other operators open theirs only as much as they want. Publishing paths: share to a big server, publish on pkarr, or self-host. All comms through iroh on the backend; first-class clients.

The idea, broadened

Phase 13 made shells a contract; this topic spends it. Broaden beyond 'more clients': each shell is a capability statement — what a phone can honestly present, what offline means for a journaled world, what a hardware terminal (the ESP32 wing line of work) does to input and attention. The conformance suite is the product: a new shell is done when it passes, not when it demos.

Research questions (first pass)

• Mobile web/PWA: offline read model for world state, reconnect and catch-up semantics, push/notify via F12.5 providers
• Native shells: what id: idea — native GUI client #1072's research concluded; share of code between web, native and TUI shells (frame layer vs presentation layer)
• Hardware shells: ESP32-class constraints (screen, input, power) — which world interactions survive at that size
• Shell capability providers (F13.7, id: Phase 13 F13.7 client-side capability providers under the ceiling model #789) as the extension point for shell-specific powers (camera, files, sensors)

Dependencies and existing pieces

Builds on Phase 13 (F13.1 contract done, #788 F13.6 native shells, #789 F13.7 capability providers), #1071 TUI, #1072 native GUI. Conformance check from F13.1 is the gate for every shell here.

Next steps — the version ladder

• v1 — first-iteration design — its own issue, filed in the same pass and linked in the first comment below
• v2 — outline: native & TUI completion — its own issue, filed in the same pass and linked in the first comment below
• v3 — outline: hardware shell — its own issue, filed in the same pass and linked in the first comment below
• v4 — outline: third-party shells — its own issue, filed in the same pass and linked in the first comment below

Plus a standing rule for this topic: anything the research surfaces that doesn't fit v1–v4 gets its own issue (Drew's rule: every feature, concept, or idea gets an issue), and future investigations are listed as comments here rather than lost.

Sequencing

Design queue order: F12.4 provider registry (#1061) and F12.10 scheduling/quotas (#1067) designs land first; Phase 14 v1 designs then run hosted worlds → discovery → agents spike → the rest. Implementation follows Phase 13. The drop rule applies throughout: anything that proves blocked, wrong, or superseded gets parked or closed with a note — never a silent stall.

Acceptance criteria

• A research + design output exists for More shells (mobile, native, hardware): design documents broadening the topic beyond the current understanding, per the Phase 14 principles in the body (local-first plus hosted coordination).
• Multiple concrete next steps are produced as implementation plans / implementation issues filed from this topic.
• No implementation starts under this issue itself (per its own charter).