Turn Your Phone Into an AI Agent using Claude

Imagine asking an AI to book a ride, check an app, or complete a workflow on your phone and having it actually do it. Claude provides the intelligence, while mobilerun provides the ability to interact with real mobile apps, making it possible to build powerful AI agents for Android and iOS with just a few prompts. 

You install an app on an Android phone you already own, connect it to the mobilerun cloud, and point Claude at it. Here's how to set it up, start to finish.

What you're actually building

Before the steps, it helps to picture the three pieces and how they fit.

The first piece is your phone, running an app called mobilerun Portal. Portal is the bridge: it reads the screen's a11y tree so an agent can understand what's on it, and it executes the taps, swipes, and text input the agent decides to make. No rooting or emulator, it works directly on your real phone. You can download this app from github. 

The second piece is mobilerun Cloud. Once Portal connects to it, your phone shows up alongside any hosted cloud phones in your account, and it can run tasks from the Playground or through the API. The cloud is what lets you reach the device from anywhere instead of being tethered to a cable.

The third piece is Claude. It talks to Mobilerun through a mobile harness that sees your connected phone as an available device. You describe the goal; Claude figures out the steps and mobilerun executes them on your personal device.

Step 1: Download and install the Portal APK

Start on the phone. You have two ways to get Portal onto it, and most people should take the easy one.

The simple route is to go to the mobilerun Portal on github and install the latest APK directly. If you're a developer and want to build from source, you can instead clone the Portal repository from GitHub and build and install it with Gradle or ADB but for turning an old phone into an agent, the prebuilt APK is all you need.

One thing to expect: because you're sideloading an APK rather than installing from the Play Store, Google Play Protect may flag the installation. If it blocks Portal, you can temporarily pause scanning: open the Play Store, tap your profile icon, go to Play Protect, open its settings with the gear icon, and pause "Scan apps with Play Protect" long enough to finish installing. Turn it back on afterward if you like.

Step 2: Grant Portal the permissions it needs

Portal can't drive the phone without a few permissions, and this is the step people most often rush past.

When prompted, enable the mobilerun Portal accessibility service. This is the key one, it's what lets Portal read the UI and perform actions. Then open Settings inside the Portal app and grant permission for notifications and turn on auto-accept for screenshare and app install. Those last two matter because they let the agent capture the screen and install apps without a human tapping "Allow" every few seconds.

None of this requires root or developer wizardry. It's a handful of toggles, and the app walks you through them.

Step 3: Connect the phone to mobilerun Cloud

Now link the device to your account.

On the Portal main screen, press the Connect to mobilerun button. If it prompts you for an email, use the same one you signed up with at cloud.mobilerun.ai that's how mobilerun knows this phone belongs to you. Give it a moment, and when setup completes your phone appears in the Devices tab as a connected physical device.

One practical note: keep the app running so the device stays online. Portal has a "Keep Screen Awake" option in its settings that's worth enabling if you want the phone to stay reachable while it sits on a shelf. An old phone plugged into a charger in a drawer, running Portal, is genuinely all the hardware you need.

At this point your phone is a live, addressable device in the mobilerun cloud. You could drive it from the Playground right now. But the fun part is handing the controls to Claude.

Step 4: Connect Claude to mobilerun

You'll need a mobilerun API key first, grab one from the API keys page at cloud.mobilerun.ai. Keys start with dr_sk_. Treat it like a password.

If you use Claude Code, connecting is a single command:

1claude mcp add --transport http mobilerun https://api.mobilerun.ai/v1/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer dr_sk_YOUR_API_KEY"
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If you use Claude Desktop (or Cursor or VS Code), add the mobilerun server to your MCP config instead:

1{
2  "mcpServers": {
3    "mobilerun": {
4      "url": "https://api.mobilerun.ai/v1/mcp",
5      "transport": "http",
6      "headers": {
7        "Authorization": "Bearer dr_sk_YOUR_API_KEY"
8      }
9    }
10  }
11}
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The connection is hosted over HTTP, so there's no ADB and no local setup on Claude's side. Restart Claude, and it can now see the phone you connected in Step 3 as one of its available devices.

Step 5: Give it a task

Now describe what you want in plain language and let Claude do the tapping. A good first test is something small and observable so you can watch the agent work:

Claude reads the screen through Portal, reasons about what it sees, and acts one step at a time to launch settings, find the display menu, toggle the switch. Under the hood it's running an observe-act loop: look at the screen, decide the next action, do it, look again. Because it's reasoning about the live UI rather than replaying a brittle recorded script, it doesn't fall apart the moment an app nudges a button to a new spot.

Once you trust it with small things, the interesting tasks open up: checking an app that has no web version, filling out a repetitive mobile-only form, pulling information out of an app and summarizing it, or watching for a notification and reacting to it. Anything you'd normally do by thumb, an agent can now do for you.

A few things worth knowing

Privacy is real here. Screenshots and the UI tree can contain sensitive personal data messages, account details, whatever is on the screen. This is your own phone and your own data, but be deliberate about which apps you let an agent near, and keep your dr_sk_ key secret.

Old phones are perfect for this. You don't need your daily driver. A retired handset with a charger and Wi-Fi, tucked away running Portal, makes an ideal always-on agent that never interrupts your actual phone.

Keep Portal running. If the device shows as disconnected, it's almost always because the app was closed or the screen management settings got reset. Reopen Portal and tap Connect.

The bigger picture

What makes this genuinely different from old-school automation is that there's no scripting. You're not recording macros or writing selectors that shatter on the next app update. You're describing intent to a model that looks at the screen and figures out the rest, the same way you'd tell a capable assistant "just book the cheapest one" and trust them to navigate the app.

An hour of setup, download the APK, flip a few permissions, connect to the cloud, point Claude at it and turn a phone that was gathering dust into a device that works while you don't. That's a strange and slightly wonderful thing to have running in a drawer.