The iOS monitor
The Mac does the heavy lifting; the iOS monitor lets you watch it from anywhere on set — running jobs, throughput and ETA on your phone, your lock screen, your Dynamic Island and your wrist. It is read-only by design: a window onto the run, never a remote control, so a pocket-tap can never pause an offload.
Setup
Install the monitor
On iPhone (iOS 17.2 or newer — Live Activities need it) and, optionally, Apple Watch.
Sign in with the same account
The monitor gets its own least-privilege identity: it can watch your runs and nothing else — no copy, unlock or disk authority, and it doesn't count against your Mac device limit. The watch app holds no credentials at all (it's fed by the phone).
That's it
Start a run on the Mac and it appears on the phone. If this Mac should have a friendlier name than its hostname, set it in the Mac's Settings → Computer name.
What you see
Now
The glanceable answer to "how's it going?": every active job — which card feeds which disk, the phase, progress, throughput and ETA. Metrics match the operation: MB/s for copies, frames/sec for transcodes. When more than one Mac is offloading (two carts, two IngestDecks), a picker filters All Macs or one machine.
Transfers
The day's ledger: every job grouped Active / Waiting / Done per Mac, each with its phase timeline (prep → copy/convert → verify → finish). Drill into a job for file-level progress — bytes moving and verification landing per file, mirrored from the Mac's published snapshot. Never a second copy of your media; nothing on the phone touches footage.
Lock Screen & Dynamic Island
The leading job rides your lock screen and Dynamic Island as a Live Activity — progress bar, current file, ETA — without unlocking the phone. It starts even if the monitor app is closed (the Mac pushes it awake), updates continuously while the run goes, and if the Mac drops off the network the activity marks itself stale rather than pretending — you always know whether you're looking at live truth.
Apple Watch
The leading job as a progress ring on your wrist, plus Smart Stack and complication widgets. Bridged from the phone — glance mid-setup without pulling anything out of a pocket.
When the connection drops
The monitor degrades honestly: it keeps the last snapshot, shows the connection as unavailable, and reconnects automatically when it can (and whenever it returns to the foreground). Nothing on the Mac is affected — the run doesn't know the audience left.
Parity is a rule, not a hope. Whatever operation the Mac can run — copy, convert, verify, compare, eject — the monitor renders its real state with the right metric. If the Mac learns a new trick, the monitor learns to show it in the same release.