Phone Harness 📱
phone-harness · let your agent control your phone.
Connect Claude Code, Codex, or any agent to your real phone. iPhone through the Mac's iPhone Mirroring window, Android over adb from macOS, Linux or Windows, or a Phone Harness Cloud phone — an Android over adb, or an iPhone over HTTPS. No jailbreak, no Xcode, nothing installed on the phone. The agent sees the screen, taps, types, and reads the result.
● agent: wants to open Weather
│
● find_text("Weather") → (400, 468)
│
● tap(400, 468) → reads the screen → forecast is up
✓ done
Try Phone Harness Cloud → Hosted iPhones and Androids with stealth, real numbers, 2FA, and unlimited devices
Get started by sending the setup prompt to your coding agent.
Demo
Task: "Buy me a Waymo to Delah Coffee from my current location."
phone-harness-demo.mp4
Setup
Paste into Claude Code or Codex:
Install or upgrade phone-harness to the latest stable version with uv using Python 3.12, register the skill from `phone-harness skill`, then read https://github.com/ShawnPana/phone-harness/blob/main/onboarding.md and walk me through it. Follow https://github.com/ShawnPana/phone-harness/blob/main/install.md if setup or connection fails.
The agent asks which phone is your default and walks you through the parts
that need your hands: pairing iPhone Mirroring and granting Accessibility and
Screen Recording, or turning on Android developer options and approving adb.
It also offers a cloud Android — the same helpers with nothing to pair, and
the first 100 minutes free — so an iPhone user can test on Android too.
phone-harness --doctor checks the chain. Details in install.md.
Hermes Agent: hermes plugins install ShawnPana/phone-harness/integrations/hermes
adds a phone_exec tool and this skill. See integrations/hermes.
Usage
phone-harness <<'PY' open_app("Notes") tap_text("New Note") type_text("hello from the harness") print([o["text"] for o in screen()][:10]) PY phone-harness --version
phone-harness --version (or -V) prints phone-harness <version>.
Helpers are pre-imported. SKILL.md is the agent's day-to-day
guide; helpers.py is the full list.
Task-specific helpers live in ~/.phone-harness/agent-workspace
(see install.md). The first run creates that folder from
the packaged defaults and never overwrites an existing one. Delete the
folder for a fresh default; the next run recreates it. A checkout uses
its own agent-workspace/ instead.
No phone on your desk? Rent one
phone-harness cloud login # once: approve in your browser phone-harness cloud ls # phones on the account, and any live session phone-harness cloud start # cloud.phone if set, else a temporary Android; 15 min (--for 90s, 15m) phone-harness cloud start ios # the account's iPhone, when only one is listed phone-harness <<'PY' print(screenshot()) PY phone-harness cloud stop # billing stops; a saved Android is written back
cloud ls is the catalog (GET /me → available): each phone's label,
platform, and id, with a live session on that row (matched by device id,
profile id, or the temporary row). A cloud iPhone session does not echo its
catalog id (device is the word "iPhone", and profile is an iphone-… id
that matches no catalog row). That session is written on the one catalog row
of the same platform and kind whose state is running, when that is the
only such row and the only unmatched session of that platform and kind. A
session that matches nothing is its own row. cloud start with no name
starts this machine's cloud.phone setting if one is set, else what the
service gives an unnamed start, a temporary Android. A name is a catalog id or label, or ios /
android when only one entry has that platform. A cloud Android
is reached over adb, so every helper works on it unchanged. A cloud iPhone has
no shell: the helpers POST ops over HTTPS, OCR runs on the host, and driving
it is in SKILL.md. phone-harness cloud lists the rest, including
watch, open, history, and phone for the saved Android. --session SID
(or PHONE_HARNESS_SESSION) pins one rented phone for this process.
Updates
phone-harness update upgrades a uv tool
(uv tool upgrade phone-harness) or a git checkout (git pull --ff-only).
Any other install prints pip install -U phone-harness and leaves it for
you to run. The tool never updates itself. On a terminal, once a day, it
prints one line on stderr when PyPI has a newer version. Set
PHONE_HARNESS_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 to silence that notice.
How it works
iPhone. iPhone Mirroring renders the phone as a Mac window and forwards mouse and keyboard as touches. The harness captures that window, OCRs it with Apple's Vision framework for text with tap-ready coordinates, and posts HID-level events for taps, swipes, and typing.
Android. adb is the transport. screencap is the capture, the phone's
accessibility tree is the text source, input is the hands. Works over USB or
Wi‑Fi, no window needed.
Cloud iPhone. phone-harness cloud start with that phone's catalog id,
label, or ios when it is the only one, drives it over HTTPS from any OS.
The host runs OCR; taps use the phone's screen points. No adb and no
accessibility tree. Day-to-day steps are in SKILL.md.
Same helpers throughout. phone-harness config set platform ios|android picks
the desk default.
Limits
- Unlocking the iPhone pauses mirroring; a PIN-locked Android needs the user.
- OCR sees text, not icons. Unlabeled controls need a screenshot and a vision-capable model.
- No multi-touch, no camera or Face ID flows. DRM video renders black.
- Connecting the phone is always the user's job.
Sponsor
phone-harness is free and maintained in my own time. Sponsoring keeps it that way.