Phone Harness lets Claude Code and Codex agents drive real phones
Phone Harness, an open-source project trending on GitHub, connects Claude Code, Codex or any other agent to a real phone: iPhones through the Mac's iPhone Mirroring window, Android over adb on macOS, Linux or Windows, or a rented Phone Harness Cloud device (Android over adb, iPhone over HTTPS) — with no jailbreak, no Xcode and nothing installed on the phone. The agent captures the screen, OCRs the text (Apple's Vision framework for iPhone, the accessibility tree for Android), then taps, types and swipes and reads back the result using the same set of helpers. The README lists limits: unlocking an iPhone pauses mirroring, a PIN-locked Android needs the user, OCR sees text but not icons, there is no multi-touch, camera or Face ID support, and DRM video renders black; cloud Android starts with 100 free minutes, and only cloud Android is billed by the minute, while connecting the phone is always the user's job.
Bringing real phones into an agent's tool chain lets automation move beyond the browser and terminal into actual apps, though it still depends on local pairing and permissions granted by the user.