When your phone can't reach your computer

What it is

An amber warning strip with a warning triangle, shown at the very top of the mobile interface. It answers one question — can this phone reach my computer at all? — and it answers it by checking, not by guessing: the phone quietly asks the computer whether it is there, twice, and only speaks up if both attempts fail.

It sits above every other connection message, because it is the most basic one: nothing else the app tells you about the connection matters until this is true.

Where to find it

At the top of the Omniscio screen on a phone or in a phone browser, above whatever you are looking at. It appears on its own and needs no setting to turn on.

Which sentence you get depends on how your phone reached Omniscio in the first place:

Your phone's address	What it says	What to check
A Tailscale name (ends .ts.net) or a 100.x address	"Can't reach your computer. Check that Tailscale is on and connected on this device."	The Tailscale app on the phone — is it running and connected?
A home-network address (192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, 172.16–31.x.x)	"Can't reach your computer. Check you're on the same Wi-Fi as your computer."	That the phone and the computer are on the same network.
Anything else	"Can't reach your computer."	Nothing specific — Omniscio will not guess a cause it cannot see.

How it behaves

Why there is no button. The obvious design — a "reload" button — is worse than nothing here. Omniscio's phone app keeps a copy of its own interface on the device so it opens instantly, and that copy answers a reload without ever asking your computer. A reload while the computer is unreachable therefore repaints the app in a flash and lands you right back where you were: the screen blinking back over and over, with nothing actually retried. That blinking is what the old button produced.

So this warning has no action. Fix the thing the sentence names, and the strip clears itself on the next check — no tap, no reload, nothing to remember.

When you will not see it.

• Your phone is genuinely offline, with no internet at all — you get the separate "You are offline" notice instead, which is about your phone rather than your computer.
• The connection is healthy — the strip never appears, and nothing is checked.
• You are in the desktop app — it is a phone-only warning, because the desktop is the computer.
• Your phone's screen is off — nothing is checked in the background, so no battery is spent and nothing is sent.

Turning it off. If you would rather not see the warning, open your phone browser's developer console and run localStorage.setItem('amc-disable-host-unreachable-hint', '1'), then reload once. It is a phone-local setting and nothing else changes: the app reconnects exactly as it always did.

Related

• Mobile Access (run and triage your sessions from a phone)
• Mobile Access — when something is wrong
• Mobile performance — the habits that keep it fast