← saul.link
· 5 min read

Running Claude Code on Your Phone

F-Droid Termux, Tailscale SSH, and an AI pair programmer in your pocket. No gimmicks.

aimobiledevopstailscaleandroid

I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t really need an IDE anymore. With Claude Max—the $200/month subscription tier—I can edit single characters through the chat interface if I want. The IDE has become a viewer.

If the walk to the gas station takes longer than you’re willing to have --dangerously-skip-permissions enabled on your machine, this setup isn’t for you. But if you’re anything like me and have to leave the house with an idea or unfinished feature burning a hole in your head, keep reading.

You can run Claude Code on your phone. Not a watered-down web interface. The actual CLI. Full tool access. File editing. Git commits. The works.

Here’s how.

The Setup

You need three things:

  1. F-Droid Termux - Not the Play Store version (it’s abandoned). Get it from F-Droid.
  2. Tailscale - Your phone joins your tailnet.
  3. A machine running Claude Code - Your laptop, a server, whatever.

That’s it. No complex tunneling. No port forwarding. No exposing anything to the internet.

Quick note: this guide is for Android. Sorry, not an iPad guy. That said, if you’ve got an external keyboard, the workflow should be killer on both platforms.

Why Tailscale

I’ll be direct: Tailscale is one of the few pieces of software I genuinely love. It does one thing extremely well and stays out of your way.

Your devices get stable IPs on a private mesh network. No configuration. No firewall rules. No remembering which port you forwarded where. Install it, authenticate, done.

The magic command on your home machine:

tailscale up --ssh

The --ssh flag is what enables Tailscale SSH—it tells Tailscale to run an SSH server that handles connections from your tailnet. Without it, you’d need traditional SSH keys and config.

Important: Your home machine needs to stay on and have Tailscale running. If it’s off, there’s nothing for your phone to connect to. Keep that laptop open or use a dedicated server.

(Note: Tailscale is moving toward tailscale set --ssh as the preferred command, but tailscale up --ssh still works fine.)

This enables SSH over your tailnet. Your phone can now SSH into any machine on your tailnet without touching your router, without opening ports, without certificates or keys on the phone itself. Tailscale handles the authentication through the same identity you already use.

If you’re still manually managing SSH keys across devices in 2026, stop.

The Phone Side

Install Termux from F-Droid. The Play Store version is years out of date and will cause you pain.

pkg update && pkg upgrade
pkg install openssh

Install Tailscale on your phone (regular app store is fine for this). Sign in. Your phone is now on your tailnet.

SSH into your machine:

ssh user@your-machine

Where your-machine is the Tailscale hostname. If you have MagicDNS enabled (you should), you don’t need to know the IP. Just use the machine name. Tailscale resolves it. No key management. No passwords if you’ve set up Tailscale SSH properly.

Running Claude Code

SSH in from Termux and run it:

claude

That’s it. Claude Code on your phone.

Picking Up Where You Left Off

If you started a session earlier and want to continue:

claude --continue

This loads the most recent conversation in your current directory. Quick and seamless for sequential work.

If you have multiple sessions and want a specific one:

claude --resume session-name

--resume lets you target a specific session by ID or name. Useful when you’ve got several features in flight and need to jump back to a particular context.

The difference: --continue is “give me my last conversation,” while --resume is “give me that specific conversation.”

Why This Matters

I’ve tried mobile coding before. It’s miserable. You’re fighting the keyboard, squinting at some half-baked IDE, and by the time you’ve context-switched back to what you were doing, your stop’s arrived.

This is different. You’re not really typing code. You’re talking to something that types code. Big difference on a phone. Describe the problem, read what it did, say yes or no. That’s the loop. It works on a small screen because you’re reviewing, not writing.

Practical Considerations

  • Battery: Termux with an active SSH session sips battery. It’s fine.
  • Screen size: Use landscape. Still cramped but workable.
  • Keyboard: Get a bluetooth keyboard if you do this often. Makes a big difference.
  • Connection: Tailscale handles intermittent connectivity gracefully. Your session doesn’t die when you switch from WiFi to cellular.

The Workflow

I typically:

  1. SSH into my dev machine from Termux
  2. Navigate to the project
  3. Run claude (or claude --continue to pick up where I left off)
  4. Describe the task
  5. Review the changes
  6. Approve and commit

All from my phone.

I’ve shipped actual code this way. It works.

Don’t Have a Home Server?

If you don’t want to leave your laptop running or don’t have a home machine to connect to, plenty of people run Claude Code on a VPS. A $6/month droplet handles it fine. Some good starting points:

The VPS route also means you’re not dependent on your home network staying up.