Control Claude Code from your phone. A mobile companion we built — and then Anthropic shipped natively.
MobileCode was an ambitious attempt to solve a real developer pain point: you kick off a Claude Code session on your Mac, walk away, and your agent stalls because it needs input. We wanted to fix that — a mobile companion that let you monitor, respond to, and steer Claude Code sessions from your iPhone.
On February 25, 2026, Anthropic launched Remote Control — doing essentially exactly this, natively. We saw it coming, stopped active development weeks earlier, and are now open-sourcing everything we built.
This repo is archived. It's here as a reference, a case study, and in case any of the approaches are useful to someone building developer tools.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Jan 2026 | Identified the pain point. Registered mobilecode.org. Started building. |
| Jan 13 | First working prototype of the macOS wrapper around Claude Code. |
| Jan 15 | iOS app designs, landing page copy, App Store strategy mapped out. |
| Jan 21 | Analyzed Claude Code Web launch — saw the writing on the wall. Bidirectional handoff was clearly on Anthropic's roadmap. |
| Early Feb | Paused development. Felt Anthropic was moving faster than we could ship. |
| Feb 25 | Anthropic ships Remote Control. Almost identical to what we were building. |
A native macOS app that wraps around Claude Code to capture and relay session activity. This was the core technical challenge and where most of the interesting work happened.
Approaches we tried:
- Terminal injection — Intercepting and injecting into the Claude Code terminal session to read agent output and send user responses remotely. Worked, but fragile and dependent on terminal emulator internals.
- MCP server approach — Building a custom MCP server that Claude Code would connect to, giving us a structured communication channel. Cleaner architecture, but limited by what MCP exposed at the time.
- Hybrid approach — Combining terminal observation with MCP for structured commands. This was where we landed before pausing.
Native iOS app for receiving push notifications when Claude Code needs input and responding inline. Focused on speed — the goal was to respond to your agent in under 10 seconds from notification to reply.
API server bridging the macOS app and the iOS client. Handled session state, push notifications, and message relay. Designed for self-hosting so your code never touches third-party infrastructure.
A lightweight CLI tool for starting MobileCode-enabled Claude Code sessions. Essentially mobilecode start instead of claude, which would bootstrap the monitoring and relay setup. Lives inside the macOS app project as a separate target.
Their Remote Control feature landed on almost exactly the same architecture:
| Aspect | MobileCode (ours) | Remote Control (Anthropic) |
|---|---|---|
| Session stays local | ✓ | ✓ |
| Phone is just a window | ✓ | ✓ |
| QR code to connect | ✓ (planned) | ✓ |
| MCP servers accessible | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bidirectional sync | ✓ | ✓ |
| Auto-reconnect on sleep | Partial | ✓ |
| Push notifications | ✓ | Via Claude app |
| No cloud required | ✓ (self-hosted relay) | ✓ (Anthropic relay) |
The main thing they have that we didn't: being the platform owner. No terminal injection hacks needed when you are the terminal.
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The product instinct was right. The pain point was real — Anthropic validated it by building the exact same thing. Our mobilecode.org domain was already ranking for "claude code mobile," "mobile claude code," and related queries before the feature even existed.
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Building in the blast radius of an AI company is risky. When your product is a companion to someone else's platform, you're one product update away from irrelevance. We felt this coming and made the call to stop early rather than ship and get steamrolled.
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Terminal injection is a dead end for production tools. It works for prototypes but is inherently fragile. The MCP approach was architecturally sound — and is essentially what Anthropic uses internally for Remote Control.
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Timing matters more than execution. We could have shipped a working v1 in February. It would have had maybe 2-3 weeks of relevance before Remote Control launched. Not worth it.
mobilecode.org continues as an independent resource site for mobile AI coding — guides, tool comparisons, and updates on Remote Control and alternatives. It's not going away, it just evolved.
MIT — take whatever is useful.
Built by Skelpo GmbH. We build software for a living and occasionally for fun. This one was both.