iPhone Use

iphone-use

Let AI agents use your real iPhone.

Claude Code, Codex or any MCP client reads the screen as text, taps, types and swipes in any app, including the ones with no API.

English · 简体中文

Website and docs: iphone-use.leeguoo.com

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leeguooooo/iphone-use/main/install.sh | sh

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ee298774-bf3e-4fd0-9a08-481b20904f61

1-minute demo, real iPhone recordings · 中文版

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Need help setting up a real iPhone, connecting your agent or creating an iOS app test flow? Email us with your environment, the workflow and expected result, and where you are stuck. We review feasibility and agree on scope, acceptance criteria and a quote before work starts.

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MCP calls can choose an installed local instance with instance:"i13" (including phone_status and input tools); phone_instances lists them without reconnecting. Omit it to keep the configured daemon. Missing instances fail without selecting a different phone. See per-call instance routing.

Why iphone-use

• Any app, no API needed. It works on Health, banking and payment apps (even the ones that black out screen capture), chat apps and your own app under test.
• USB or Wi-Fi. Set the phone up once with a cable; after that it can be driven over Wi-Fi through an encrypted tunnel.
• Old iPhones too. iOS 15 and later, without updating the phone.
• Fast. Its own XCTest device runner reads the screen in about 0.1 s. A tap that returns the settled screen takes about 1.9 s (numbers).
• Honest results. Every action reports whether it was applied, not sent, or unknown, and whether a retry is safe. Taps on covered elements are refused, not passed off as done.
• Replayable flows. A task done once becomes a flow that replays in one call, with no model and no tokens.
• Remote control for people, too. Drive the phone yourself from a browser or another iPhone, on the LAN or from anywhere: a live H.264 screen, mouse and keyboard, and pairing by QR code. Agents and people share one phone without stepping on each other (details).
• Watch the agent live. The phone's screen shows in the agent host's side panel (where MCP Apps is supported), in a browser, or in the iOS app.
• Nothing on the Mac moves. It never touches the Mac's screen, cursor or focus.

What you can ask

Open Health and tell me how many steps I walked each day this week.

Find the newest message from Mom in WeChat and read it to me. Collect every transaction on this bank statement page, all the way to the end. Write this 2,000-word draft into a new note in Notes. Run my app's login test on the real phone and tell me which step fails.

The agent finds an app by its name (launch_app {"app": "Health"}) and types long text (up to 20,000 characters) in one step. It can read a list across pages and say whether it reached the end.

How it works

 Claude Code / Codex / any MCP client ──MCP──┐

scripts and other agents ─────────────HTTP──┤ ▼ iphone-use daemon on your Mac ──USB or Wi-Fi──▶ XCTest runner on the iPhone ▲ you, in a browser or the iOS app ───────────┘

One daemon per phone runs on the Mac. It reads the screen as an accessibility tree (text, not pixels), sends taps and typing through a small XCTest runner it installs on the phone, and checks that the screen has settled before it answers. Agents and people go through the same daemon, and one of them holds the phone at a time.

Install

You need

• A Mac with macOS 15 or later, and Xcode signed in to an Apple ID (a free one works).
• An iPhone with iOS 15 or later and Developer Mode on (Settings → Privacy & Security → Developer Mode).
• A USB cable for the first setup. Plug the iPhone in and unlock it before you install.

The installer then sets the phone up and shows an agent opening Settings and reading it. It registers the MCP server with Claude Code and Codex, and with Cursor and Claude Desktop when they are installed (IPHONE_USE_NO_CLIENT_SETUP=1 skips those two), and opens the control page in your browser with a one-time sign-in, so there is no password to copy. If anything is missing, it says what and how to fix it.

iphone-use status    # is the phone ready for agents?

iphone-use doctor # what is missing, and how to fix it iphone-use setup # set the phone up again (after a new iPhone or Xcode) iphone-use try # a harmless check: open Settings, read the screen, go Home iphone-use login # sign a browser in again, with a QR code for the iPhone iphone-use upgrade # update everything ~/.iphone-use/uninstall.sh --dry-run # what uninstalling would remove (drop --dry-run to do it)

Or ask your agent to install it

Paste this into Codex or Claude Code on the Mac the iPhone is plugged into:

Install iphone-use (https://github.com/leeguooooo/iphone-use) on this Mac so you can drive my iPhone.

1. Run: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leeguooooo/iphone-use/main/install.sh | sh
2. Run iphone-use doctor. Fix what it reports that can be fixed from the terminal, and run iphone-use setup when it tells you to.
3. Some steps only I can do: signing in to an Apple ID in Xcode, tapping Trust on the iPhone, turning on Developer Mode, unlocking the phone. For those, stop, tell me exactly what to do, and wait until I say it is done. Never ask me for a password or a code.
4. Run iphone-use doctor again until nothing is missing, then iphone-use try.
5. If the phone_* tools are not loaded in this chat yet, tell me to start a new chat.

Codex and Claude Code plugins

Each adds the skill and the MCP server; they still need the install above:

codex plugin marketplace add leeguooooo/iphone-use && codex plugin add iphone-use@iphone-use

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add leeguooooo/iphone-use

/plugin install iphone-use@iphone-use

Remote control for people

The same daemon that serves agents lets you drive the phone yourself:

• From a browser. The live screen arrives as H.264 encoded on the phone: native resolution at about 50 fps on the LAN, and a lighter mode for slow links. Click to tap, drag to swipe, hold to long-press, scroll with the wheel or trackpad. Type straight into the phone with your input method, and ⌘V pastes. The Controls panel lists the screen's elements so you can tap by label, and the Flow panel records what you do as a replayable flow. The page follows your browser's language (English or Chinese), with a switch in the sidebar.
• From another iPhone. The native iOS app (minimum deployment target iOS 15) pairs by scanning a QR code on the Mac's page, with no address or password to type. It plays the screen with the hardware decoder and switches between your phones. Install it with iphone-use setup-app, which signs it with your own team; with a paid team the app also controls its own phone with no Mac (details).
• Screens hidden from capture. Banking and payment apps black out screen capture; there you see a live wireframe of the screen's elements instead of a blank picture, and you can still tap through it.
• From anywhere. Reach the Mac through an authenticated HTTPS reverse proxy or a VPN such as Tailscale, and control the phone from outside your network (security notes).
• No collisions. A phone has one owner at a time. While you are in control, an agent waits or is told who holds the phone, and the reverse is true too.

Nothing on the Mac moves while you do it: no window takes focus and the cursor stays put.

Use it from an agent

To save a screenshot on the phone for use in another app, call phone_shortcut {"name":"save_screenshot"}. It requests an iOS system capture in Photos; check the new image before claiming it saved. phone_screenshot returns an image to the caller. Saving requires an updated native Runner.

A daemon on your Mac drives the phone and offers the same control in three forms:

• an MCP server for Claude Code, Codex, Claude Desktop, Cursor and other MCP clients;
• an HTTP API for agents and scripts (/agent/*);
• a web page and a native iOS app for people (remote control).

The installer registers the MCP server with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Claude Desktop when they are present (IPHONE_USE_NO_CLIENT_SETUP=1 leaves Cursor and Claude Desktop alone). Any other MCP client needs only the command; on this Mac the server finds the daemon and its token by itself:

{

"mcpServers": { "iphone-use": { "command": "/Users/YOU/Applications/iPhoneUse.app/Contents/MacOS/iphone-use-mcp" } } }

Config for Cursor, VS Code, Claude Desktop, Gemini CLI, opencode, Windsurf