I’ve been running Hermes Agent for months. I set it up once, it worked, I forgot about it — which is exactly how infrastructure should feel. But I still defaulted to Telegram for most of my day-to-day interactions with it. It was just easier to open an app I already had open than to tab over to a browser.
Then I installed Hermex.
Two weeks later, I haven’t opened the Telegram bot once.
Update, August 2026: this Hermex review originally ran after two weeks of daily driving at v1.2 back in June. The app is now at v1.5 — native iPad support, Kanban boards, Dispatcher runs, and more have shipped since. The hands-on testing below is from my original review; the What has changed section covers what’s new.
The verdict
Hermex
A free native iPhone and iPad client for self-hosted Hermes Agent, with full session sync, streaming, Live Activities, and Kanban boards.
- Tested on
- iPhone 15 Pro, iOS 18 (v1.2)
- Server
- hermes-webui (self-hosted)
- Developer
- Uzair Ansar (one person)
- Current version
- v1.5 (August 2026)
- Big hook
- Sessions, profiles, skills, workspaces, Kanban boards, and Dispatcher runs on your phone
What works
- Full session sync: every Hermes Desktop session shows up in the app, and vice versa. No surprises.
- Live Activity + Dynamic Island: process completion at a glance, even with the phone locked.
- Workspace browser is DOPE: point Hermes at any folder on your computer and run it scoped to that project.
- Stream resilience: start a task, pocket the phone, come back to a finished result. No refreshing.
- Seamless model picker: swap between Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok mid-session without restarting.
Tradeoffs
- One-person iOS client: if the developer stops shipping, the iOS client stops. The server is mature and well-supported — the app is not.
- Branding inconsistency: the privacy policy and the developer's personal site still call it Hermes Agent Mobile. Cosmetic, but it's there.
- Image previews can be hit-or-miss: share extension is great, but the workspace browser doesn't always render image previews cleanly.
Tony's take
What Hermex Actually Is
Hermex is a free native app for iPhone and iPad that steers a self-hosted Hermes Agent server. You bring the server — the app is just the steering wheel. It’s built by Uzair Ansar, a data scientist at Annalect. I tested it at v1.2 back in June; it’s now at v1.5. It is not affiliated with Nous Research, the company behind the Hermes Agent engine. Here’s the ownership chain: Hermes Agent (Nous Research) → hermes-webui (Nathan Esquenazi, MIT, nearly 17k GitHub stars) → Hermex (Uzair Ansar). Three different people, three different projects, all playing well together.
That’s the disambiguation, out of the way. Now let’s talk about what it’s like to actually use.
Setup: Five Minutes, Not Fifteen
The research brief said to budget 15 minutes. That’s probably right if you’re starting cold with a Cloudflare tunnel. I’m already running Tailscale on my laptop and iPhone, and I had hermes-webui already installed. I fed Hermes the setup prompt from Hermex’s onboarding screen, watched it bootstrap, and was typing my first message from my phone within five minutes.
If you’re not in the Tailscale ecosystem, you’ll need to expose your server — Cloudflare quick tunnel is the fastest path, Tailscale is more private if you want to set it up. Either way, the password goes in once, the connection is HTTPS, and you never think about it again.
A look at the app:
The Test Path
I ran Hermex through its paces the way you’d actually use it:
Session continuity: Works. I can see all my sessions from Hermes Desktop in Hermex, and Hermex sessions show up cleanly on the desktop. No sync surprises.
Streaming: Fast. 5–10 seconds from prompt to first token to completion, depending on the model. Tool-call cards render smoothly. I’ve never sat there waiting and wondering if something is broken.
Share extension: I use this almost daily. Any image on my phone — a photo, a document, a screenshot — goes through the iOS share sheet into Hermex and lands in the session. I used this to attach featured images while drafting TRT posts. It just works.
Workspace browser: .md files look fantastic in the app. The workspace browser also lets you point Hermes at specific folders on your computer and run it from within that context. That’s not a small feature. If you have a project directory, you can have a session that’s scoped to exactly that project, files and all.
Server update detection: When I update Hermes from my computer (git pull, restart), Hermex picks up the new version with no manual reconnection needed. It just works.
Walk-away resilience: I start a task at work, put my phone in my pocket, come back an hour later. The stream is complete or still running, depending on how long the job took. Takes a moment to catch up, then everything loads fast. No hanging, no refreshing, no “what happened to my session.”
Offline cache: Read-only when disconnected. You can review what happened, but you can’t send anything new until you’re back online. On reconnect, you pick up exactly where you left off.
The Things That Made Me Smile
The model picker is seamless. I can swap between Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok mid-session without restarting. Live Activity and Dynamic Island integration shows me process completion at a glance — I can see when a long task finishes without even unlocking my phone. And I can access all my profiles, skills, and cron jobs from the phone, which is a genuine quality-of-life upgrade over the Telegram bot.
Back in June, Hermex didn’t feel like a v1.2 side project. It felt like the Hermes Desktop experience, shrunk down and touch-optimized for your pocket.
What Has Changed Since the Original Review
Since I tested v1.2 in June, Hermex has shipped three updates. I haven’t hands-on tested these yet, so here’s what’s new per the official release notes:
v1.3 (June 18): full localization for 16 additional languages — Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified & Traditional Chinese — plus complete right-to-left layout for Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu. Faster chat loading, multi-server account switching, LaTeX math rendering, and code-block soft-wrap also landed here.
v1.4 (July 13): native iPad support with an adaptive interface designed for larger screens, plus performance improvements.
v1.5 (August 4): the big one — Kanban boards. Browse boards and status-focused views, create and edit cards, manage workflows, add comments, review operational history, and run bulk actions. You can also preview and launch Dispatcher runs from a card, with live Kanban updates and safer offline reconciliation. Response-speed metrics are now optional for streamed replies, and you can hide unused main-page and chat sections in Settings. There are also reliability improvements across new chats, deep-linked sessions, workspace navigation, cached transcripts, and interrupted-stream recovery, plus smoother transcript opening and bounded local chat caching.
The Honest Caveats
It’s a one-person app. Uzair Ansar ships it solo. The hermes-webui server it connects to has nearly 17k GitHub stars and hundreds of contributors — that’s mature, well-supported infrastructure. The iOS client is not that. If he stops shipping, the iOS client stops. I asked myself whether I’d be comfortable forking it if that happened. Honestly? I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. As long as it’s this good, I don’t need a backup plan.
The naming has some history. The app was originally branded “Hermes Agent Mobile” and rebranded to “Hermex” at v1.1. The App Store listing has since moved to the hermex slug, but a couple of surfaces still carry the old name — the privacy policy and the developer’s personal site both still say “Hermes Agent Mobile.” I barely noticed, and it didn’t matter.
Rating
5/5.
I’ve been daily driving Hermex for two weeks. Until Nous Research ships an official iOS client, I’m not going back.
Get it: App Store — also see hermexapp.com for the developer’s site.
