The internet died mid‑pitch. That was the point.
In 2013 this was pitched as APPture at RIT's Saunders Summer Start-up. The venue's connection dropped and took the live demo with it, while the founder was on stage explaining why the product would not need one.
The demo needed the internet. The room's went down.
The pitch opened with a deck streamed from a laptop “anywhere in the world,” driven from a tablet on stage, watchable by anyone who typed a web address into a browser. Mid-questions, the venue's Wi-Fi failed — the judges' connections went too, so it was the room, not the demo.
The answer given on the spot was Wi-Fi Direct: a direct peer-to-peer
connection so situations as these don't happen.
That sentence is
the entire design brief this rebuild works from.
Why go direct at all?
Peer-to-peer is not nostalgia for a simpler internet. It is shorter, cheaper, harder to switch off, and it keeps working when the network you were counting on does not.
- It is the shortest path.The device you want is ten feet away. Sending your screen to a datacentre and back to reach it is a round trip you pay for in latency, bandwidth and someone else’s uptime.
- No cable to fray, forget or carry.The dongle you left at home is the reason the meeting starts late. A link that needs no cable also needs no adapter, no spare, and no bag pocket.
- Your devices should work with each other.You bought them. Which logo is on the back should not decide whether they can talk, and an open wire format is the only way that stays true.
- No walled garden.AirPlay and Miracast work beautifully right up to the edge of the hardware they were blessed for. Nothing here can be switched off by a company, because no company is in the path.
- Your data does not go anywhere.There is no server to breach, no account to leak and no telemetry to opt out of. Local-first is a privacy property before it is a performance one.
- It still works when the internet does not.A dead venue Wi-Fi ended the 2013 demo of this exact idea. On a LAN — or, later, on no shared network at all — that failure has nowhere to land.
- It is futuristic, and it is fun.Driving a Mac from a phone across the room still feels like something from a film. That is a legitimate reason to build a thing.
- It was a serious test of agentic coding.Three byte-exact implementations, a frozen vector set and a wire format documented well enough to reimplement from is a hard target to hit. Hitting it with agents, deliberately, was half the reason to start.
- Why not? We should all build more.The parts are on the shelf and the protocols are public. The only scarce ingredient is somebody deciding to do it.
Most of 2013's promises exist now. Two were dropped on purpose.
Thirteen years is long enough for the platforms to catch up with the idea. What follows is the pitch's own list, scored against this repo — including the two lines that were abandoned deliberately.
| Promised in 2013 | In the repo, 2026 | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Cross-platform display sharing, software only | The core, three ways — Swift, Go and Kotlin, one HEVC pipeline. | shipped |
| Control the remote machine, launch anything | Remote input, where the platform allows it. iOS cannot receive. | shipped |
| Wi-Fi Direct, so no internet is needed | Became Wi-Fi Aware. Entitlement granted, code written, not one byte has flowed. | the long pole |
| Chromecast and set-top boxes | AirPlay is built in; Cast and Matter are real code behind their SDKs, unvalidated. | partly |
| File streaming | File transfer, plus an HLS re-publisher any browser can play. | shipped |
| “Touch of a button” automation | Became Contexts and Routines, mined on-device. Better than the pitch promised. | shipped |
| Home automation, some day | Matter scenes inside Routines. Validation pending. | partly |
| Mobile device management, some day | Dropped. The judges said pick one thing; they were right. | dropped |
| $99 in four app stores | Replaced by Apache-2.0. Different goal now, deliberately. | dropped |
The 2013 demo works now, including the part that needed no install.
The pitch's hardest promise was showing your screen on someone else's machine, in someone else's building, with nothing installed. Both halves of that exist today, and one deliberate gap remains.
- Present to a machine you don't own. Pairing is not restricted to your own devices — anyone in the room can pair, because trust is established by comparing a six-digit code and a word pair on both screens. Walk up to the conference Mac, pair, present. works
- Zero-install viewing. Push a screen and hand out the URL, or the QR code. Any browser on the network plays it — device-verified over real HTTP, no app on the far end. works
- Range beyond the local network. The pitch said “anywhere in the world.” This does not, and will not — that is a stated non-goal, not an unfinished feature. by choice