Run Claude Code From Your Phone: Every Path, One Overview
Yes — you can check on a running Claude Code task, or drive one, from your phone. There's no single "the" way to do it, though. This page is a short map of every approach that actually works, with a link to a deeper article on each one if you want the full detail.
Why this isn't built in already
Claude Code is a command-line tool — it expects a real terminal underneath it, reading keypresses and rendering a screen the way a TTY does. Phones don't ship a terminal by default, so getting from "phone" to "Claude Code" always means going through something else first: an official app talking to Anthropic's servers or your own machine, an SSH client connecting straight to a box you own, or a purpose-built web client sitting in between. Which layer you pick changes what you're actually depending on.
The official Claude app
This is the lowest-friction starting point if you already have an Anthropic account at the right plan tier. It covers two different modes: Cloud sessions run your task on Anthropic's own infrastructure, so your laptop can be fully off; Remote Control instead drives a Claude Code session already running on your own machine, which means it inherits that machine's uptime and network as a dependency. (Source: official docs)
Remote Control is currently a research preview, and because it's tied to a live local process, it has real limits: go without network for roughly ten minutes and the session times out; close the terminal or editor it's running in and the process dies with it. (Source: official docs)
Read more → the three specific things that kill a Remote Control session and how to fix each, and how to get notified from the official app without staring at the terminal.
CloudCLI (claudecodeui): a dedicated self-hosted web UI
If you'd rather not depend on Anthropic's account tiers at all, CloudCLI is an open-source web interface you point at your own machine — it's the most mature self-hosted alternative in this space, actively maintained, and it also drives other coding agents beyond Claude Code from the same dashboard. There's now a hosted version too, so "my machine has to stay on" isn't a hard requirement of the CloudCLI project as a whole, just of its self-hosted mode specifically.
A plain SSH client + tmux
If you already have a machine reachable over SSH, this is the fewest-moving-parts option: an SSH app on your phone, connecting into a tmux session where claude is already running. It genuinely works — the process survives a dropped connection — but you're on your own for the parts that make a phone a phone: no push notification when a task finishes, no touch-friendly Ctrl/Esc/arrow keys, and you reconnect and reattach by hand every time the network hiccups.
Read more → why the process survives an SSH drop in the first place (and why nohup alone doesn't), and what this combination still doesn't solve on a touchscreen, and what people try next.
Specifically on an iPad
All of the above apply to an iPad too, plus one more option worth knowing about: remote desktop / VNC into a full computer, which trades a lot of latency and screen space for not needing any of the setup above. Whether that tradeoff is worth it depends entirely on what you're used to.
Read more → a closer look at all three iPad-specific paths and where each one runs into a wall.
Where PocketShell fits
PocketShell is a self-hosted, single-binary alternative built specifically to be a phone-native terminal client — not tied to an Anthropic account or plan tier, and not limited to Claude Code specifically: the terminal itself is general tmux/PTY hosting, so any CLI tool you'd normally run over SSH works in it, though only four tools (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, Kimi CLI) get the automatic completion-notification wiring out of the box. It ships a dedicated touch keyboard, sequence-based reconnect replay instead of a manual reattach, and Web Push plus outbound webhook notifications.
What it isn't: there's no cloud-hosted execution mode, so like the SSH option above, your own machine still has to stay on; and its interface targets a mobile-phone-sized screen specifically, not a larger tablet or desktop layout.