Phones were built for thumbs, not for AI. The ESP32 iPhone Agent is a free, open-source project (MIT, past 4,700 stars on GitHub, featured on Hackaday) that fixes that with a $7 board: it receives your iPhone's Screen Mirroring so the AI can see the screen, and it plugs in as a mouse and keyboard so the AI can tap, swipe and type in any app.
Here's what it does, how to connect it to Claude, a task to start with, and the catch.
What it does
- Eyes: the board shows up in Control Center as a Screen Mirroring target, so every app on your screen reaches the AI.
- Hands: the board is a standard USB mouse and keyboard. With AssistiveTouch on, a click is a tap and a drag is a swipe.
- Any app a person can use: it works from what's on screen, not from app-specific hooks.
- Claude Code plugin: an MCP server and a skill let Claude look at the phone and drive it from your computer.
- The phone app: on its own, the iPhone app runs tasks with any compatible vision model, plus replay of every step.
- In the project's demo, a real iPhone finishes a Duolingo lesson by itself while nobody touches the screen.
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Get the full setup steps + the copy-paste setup prompt
The rest of this guide (3 more sections, 1 copy-paste prompt) opens right here. The setup prompt, one paste into Claude that sets it all up, comes by email only. Use your real address.
Unlocks: Step by step: connect it to Claude · The catch · Sources
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