RoomGen on a phone.

What the phone layout changes

The desktop studio is three columns: the side panel on the left, the canvas in the middle, the composer along the bottom. A phone has room for one of those at a time, so the panel becomes a sheet you pull up over the canvas, and the canvas keeps whatever is left above it.

The canvas, as it opens

The + menu

The row of pills, and the + button

With nothing selected, the row above the prompt box is how you put something on the canvas. It is a single scrollable row on a phone rather than a block that eats the screen, so slide it sideways to reach the rest.

The phone order leads with the two things a phone is actually good at:

1. Upload photo. Pick a room photo from your library.
2. Camera. Shoot one there and then.
3. AI sheet. Tap it and it offers Landscape or Portrait.
4. Frame. An empty surface to arrange work on.
5. Gallery. Reuse something you have already made.

A photo taken on a phone drops straight onto a new AI sheet, ready for a prompt. That is the shortest path from standing in a room to a restyled version of it, and it is the reason the camera sits second rather than buried in a menu.

The + button next to the prompt box reaches the same places as a full-screen list, which is easier to hit than a small popover anchored near the edge of the screen. It words them slightly differently - Choose a photo and Take a photo - and it adds one row the pills leave out: Upload plan, shown greyed with Needs a desktop underneath, so the feature is visible even where it cannot be used.

The panel: pull it up, park it

The sheet is anchored to the bottom of the screen and rises when you pull its handle. Everything the conversation needs travels with it: the source pills, the prompt bar, and the Agent, Designer library and AI Video tabs along its foot. It rests at three positions: a bar holding the pills, the prompt and those tabs, a little over half the screen, and nearly full height for reading a conversation. It opens at the middle one, so the thread is there without asking.

Flicking it counts. The sheet projects where your flick was heading and settles at the nearest resting position, rather than snapping back to wherever your finger happened to lift, so you can throw it open or shut without aiming.

Moving things: press and hold

One finger on a canvas is ambiguous: it could mean move this tile, or move the whole canvas. Desktop does not have this problem, because dragging a tile and dragging the background are different targets and the pointer is precise enough to tell them apart.

So a phone asks you to commit. Press and hold a tile for about half a second and it lifts, with a short vibration to confirm, and then follows your finger with the same grid snapping as on desktop. Drag without holding and you pan the canvas as before.

The delay is only ever paid by moving something. A tap still selects instantly, and starting to pan is instant too, because travelling more than a few pixels cancels the hold before it completes.

Video cards: hold to play, double-tap to open

Cards in the Designer library and the camera-move list carry an example clip. On desktop the clip plays when you hover and the detail popup opens when you click, which works because a mouse has two separate inputs. A finger has one, and it was spent on the popup, so the clips were unreachable on a phone.

Press and hold a card to play its clip. It plays for as long as you hold and stops when you lift, so there is no second control to find.

Double-tap the card to open the detail popup, which shows the same example larger and looping along with what the preset does.

Apply is unchanged. It is a separate button below the card and responds to a single tap, so the action that spends credits stays immediate and cannot be triggered by a stray hold.

What stays on desktop

Four things are deliberately not available on a phone. They are shown greyed out with a short note rather than hidden, so you can tell the difference between a feature that is missing and a feature that is elsewhere.

What a phone is actually good for

The phone layout is not a shrunken desktop, and the jobs it does best are not the same jobs.

Capture on site. Standing in a room is the one moment you have the room in front of you. Shoot it from the camera pill, and the photo lands on an AI sheet ready for a prompt. Restyling, decluttering and staging all start from exactly this.

Show a client. Double-tap a render to open it, or a clip to play it. Handing someone a phone is a much lower-friction way to show work than opening a laptop, and the canvas is the same canvas.

Review and steer between sessions. Renders take time. Checking what finished, marking a favourite as a reference for the next pass, or firing off a video clip are all short tasks that do not need a desk.

Plan work belongs at a desk. Uploading a floor plan, tracing rooms and setting up a project structure is the half of RoomGen that rewards a big screen. A reasonable split is to set the project up on desktop once, then work it from wherever you are.

If you are new to the studio, start with creating a project at a desk, then come back here. The gestures on this page are the phone equivalents of the ones in click, double-click and ⌘-click, and panning and zooming still applies: pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and use Fit if your work has wandered off screen.