How Cradle works
Cradle is built as two systems with one contract between them. That separation is the whole design: it is what lets the product exist today, running against a simulator, and run real Android and iOS devices tomorrow without rewriting anything you can see.
The control plane
Everything you interact with — workspaces, devices, accounts, content, schedules, jobs and history — lives in the control plane. It decides what should happen, when, who is allowed to ask for it, and which device and account should carry it out.
It holds no knowledge of how a phone is driven. There is no screen coordinate, no automation framework and no device-specific logic anywhere in it.
The Farm Agent
A Farm Agent is a small program that runs on a machine sitting next to your devices. It decides how to carry out a requested job on the hardware in front of it.
It only ever dials out. There is no inbound port to open, no static IP to arrange and no firewall exception to request — which is what makes it practical to run in an office, a warehouse or a rack you do not fully control.
The pipeline
- 1
Post
Caption + media references
- 2
Scheduler
Due time reached
- 3
Device job
Queued for one device
- 4
Farm Agent
Leases and executes
- 5
Real app
Published on the phone
Media never travels inside a job. The agent asks for it separately and receives a short-lived, authorised download link.
What happens when something breaks
A job is handed out under a lease. If the agent stops reporting — the machine sleeps, the network drops — the lease expires, the job returns to the queue, and the device is released so nothing is stuck.
When a device genuinely needs a person, the job stops in a needs attention state that names the failing step and what to do about it. Nothing fails silently, and nothing retries forever.
Try it without hardware
Cradle includes a Farm Agent Simulator that speaks the exact same contract as a real agent. It registers, reports devices, leases jobs, downloads media through the same authorised path, and reports progress step by step. You can complete a full scheduled post before plugging in a single phone.