Foyer

See everything at a glance. Foyer is a phone-first, local-first triage surface that pulls SMS/MMS/RCS, email, and app notifications into one calm, pre-digested view — built for brains that get overwhelmed processing messages one at a time.

It is not another notification stream. Foyer never pings you. It is a place you go to, on your terms, that has already done the triage for you.

The idea in one breath

The phone isn't the problem; the interaction contract is — unbounded lists, interrupting pings, a decision per item, and dread proportional to uncertainty. Foyer inverts all of that: bounded, pull-only, pre-triaged, low-fidelity, with a "later" you can trust.

Two surfaces, one app

• The Sill — a home-screen widget. Ambient weather for your messages: "quiet · 2 worth a look · nothing on fire." No unread counts, no red badge. You glance without opening anything.
• The Foyer — the screen you open when you choose to process. A bounded, pre-triaged view: Waiting on you → Worth a look → Can wait → Noise. Reaching the bottom is the "you're caught up" state.

How it works (at a glance)

• A Kotlin notification-listener Tauri plugin is the universal sensor: every notification (SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, email apps, dating apps) flows through one pipe.
• SMS/MMS are also read from the Telephony provider for history; email is pulled directly via IMAP/Gmail.
• A small on-device model does always-on triage and classification — private, cheap, no heat.
• Your Claude API key is used only when you tap an item for a deep summary, thread context, or a draft reply (RAG over local files). Nothing leaves the phone unless you pull it.

Getting started

Foyer builds and runs inside the shared Liminal HQ Android container — no local Android SDK required. Open the repo in the devcontainer (.devcontainer/devcontainer.json, image ghcr.io/liminal-hq/tauri-dev-mobile), which installs Bun and dependencies on create.

bun install            # if not already done by the devcontainer
bun run dev:desktop    # Tauri desktop dev
bun run dev:android    # Tauri Android dev
bun run test           # JS/TS + (in CI) Rust tests

See docs/architecture/build-and-ci.md for the full toolchain and CI model.

Status

Scaffolded (Bun + Tauri v2 monorepo, capture plugin, calm Foyer screen, tests, CI). The capture → triage → persist pipeline and the Sill widget are next; see TODO.md. Key docs:

• SPEC.md — task & specification document
• docs/design/calm-contract.md — why Foyer is shaped the way it is
• docs/README.md — documentation index
• AGENTS.md — contributor & agent conventions

Stack

• Frontend: React + TypeScript + MUI (Material-UI v7), Material You theming
• Host: Rust (Tauri v2)
• Mobile native: Kotlin (custom Tauri plugins)
• Persistence: SQLite (tauri-plugin-sql)
• Intelligence: On-device small model (triage) + Claude API (on-demand depth/RAG)
• Tooling: Bun workspaces; builds run in the shared Liminal HQ Android container

Privacy

Local-first. No analytics. Message content stays on device unless you explicitly tap for cloud-assisted depth, and you control what may be sent. Canadian English throughout.

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Part of Liminal HQ — local-first apps, privacy, calm computing.