Shell Drop / Claude Code on iPhone

Claude Code on iPhone

Claude Code runs on a computer, and that computer does not need to be in front of you. Leave it running in tmux on a Mac mini, a VPS or any box you can SSH into, and the session keeps working whether you are watching it or not. Shell Drop is a free iOS terminal built around exactly this: connecting to that box from your phone, attaching to the session, and steering.

The setup

One tmux session per agent on the server. Shell Drop saves the connection, so opening the session is one tap from the home screen. Vertical swipe scrolls the history, horizontal swipe moves between sessions, and the tab names sync from tmux so you always know which agent you are looking at. If you run more than one agent, the Droplet Visualizer shows every live session at once.

Steering without typing

Prompts are the painful part of a phone terminal, so Shell Drop gives you three ways around the glass keyboard. Voice Drop transcribes speech on-device for free, or through your own Groq API key, and drops the words at the cursor. Screenshots paste straight into the session for Claude to read, and the paperclip button on the toolbar attaches a file, photo or video the same way, uploading it over SSH and dropping the path at the prompt. You choose the upload size limit. Settings goes from 100 MB to 1 GB, and if a file is over, Shell Drop offers to raise it on the spot. And when Claude writes something you need on your phone, say "copy that to my clipboard" and it lands in your pasteboard, ready for Mail or Slack.

The whole thing is free

Every feature ships in the free app. No subscription, no account, no telemetry. SSH keys can be generated in the Secure Enclave, where the private key never leaves the chip.

Shell Drop also runs Codex, Grok, Hermes, OpenClaw and opencode the same way. Anything that lives in a terminal.

On the foldable iPhone Duo, opening the phone gives Claude Code a wider Tmux pane on the inner display, and Tmux resizes once per fold or unfold. Folded, the outer screen keeps the session centred and clear of the status bar column, so the output is still easy to check. Shell Drop on iPhone Duo covers both.

Claude Code on iPhone, answered