Note
Built with AI. Tawny is made by its maintainer working with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Most of the code, documentation and store artwork here was written with Claude, under the maintainer's direction. Some people avoid AI-built software for ethical, political, professional or personal reasons, so you should know that before you install, run or contribute.
Turn two phones into a private pet camera. One phone stays with the pet (the Monitor) and streams its camera and microphone; the other (the Viewer) watches, listens, talks back, and rings a chime. Pairing is a photo of a QR code — no account, no sign-up.
Video and audio go peer to peer over WebRTC, encrypted end to end (DTLS-SRTP). On your home Wi-Fi nothing leaves the house: one of your phones does the job a server would.
- Android app:
README-ANDROID.md - Self-hosting (container, relay, rendezvous): the separate Tawny Docker repo — image
ghcr.io/pressf4me/tawny - Security model & residual risk:
SECURITY.md
Want a viewer with nothing installed? Run Tawny Docker on a box at home
and watch from any browser on your tailnet.
Tawny is free: no ads, no account, no paywall, nothing locked. The only recurring cost is the rendezvous/TURN relay that lets the two phones find each other when they are not on the same Wi-Fi. Chipping in unlocks nothing — every feature is there for everyone either way.
The two buttons above are the same ones in the app's About screen. Anything else asking for money in Tawny's name isn't us.
| Situation | Path | Server involved |
|---|---|---|
| Both phones on the same Wi-Fi | The Monitor runs a tiny signalling relay on the LAN; the Viewer connects straight to it. | none — it's the Monitor phone |
| Phones on different networks (optional build) | Both phones dial out to a small rendezvous service that only introduces them. If they can't reach each other directly, an encrypted TURN relay forwards the media (it can't read it). | one small always-on service — the Play build uses the developer's; self-hosting it lives in the Tawny Docker repo |
No inbound ports are opened on either phone in any configuration.
The rendezvous and TURN can be your own, set in the installed app rather
than at build time: long-press the version stamp on any screen → Diagnostics →
Servers. If your relay does not answer, the app falls back to the built-in one
instead of losing the remote path. See README-ANDROID.md, "Servers
(advanced)".
A channel is a name plus a 128-bit key generated on the device. Servers are
told only sha256(key), so channels can't be guessed or enumerated, and the key
never reaches a server. The key rides in the pairing QR / link.
A pairing code is good for ten minutes, counted down on the Monitor's own
screen and re-minted in place when it runs out — an old photograph of a QR does
not pair a phone later. Phones that paired inside the window keep working; the
rule is about who can newly join, not how long a session lasts. See
SECURITY.md, "Pairing codes expire after ten minutes".
MIT — see LICENSE. Use it, fork it, ship it; keep the copyright
notice. The owlet mascot and the Tawny name are the one exception: they are the
app's identity on the Play Store, so please use your own if you publish a fork.
android/ the Android app (native shell + bundled web client)
public/ the web client — index.html, style.css, app.js, i18n.js
public/vendor/ QR encode/decode libraries, vendored for offline use
public/sounds/ chime clips (sounds/_src/ holds the recordings; not shipped)
tools/ build, release, emulator and probe helpers
docs/diagnostic-reports.md what an opt-in diagnostic report contains
docs/media/ README screenshots (from the store pack)
README-ANDROID.md building and running the Android app
privacy-policy.md privacy policy source text
SECURITY.md threat model, hardening, residual risk
The self-host relay (server.js), the rendezvous Worker, and the container —
automatic HTTPS over Tailscale and an optional bundled TURN relay — live in the
separate Tawny Docker repo, which vendors
public/ from here.
No CDN, no web fonts fetched at runtime, no analytics — the app works on a network with no internet at all.