What is portable.dev?

Portable lets you use Claude Code from your phone by connecting a mobile app to a small program that runs on your own computer. You install a command line tool, run one command called portable, and it prints a QR code in your terminal. You then open the Portable mobile app, sign in, and scan that code to pair your phone with your PC. From then on you can chat with Claude about your code, browse your GitHub repositories, issues, and pull requests, and let the AI read files or manage issues on your behalf, all from your phone. Because it uses your own Claude Code subscription, there is no extra cost and no separate billing layer in between. It is described as free, open source, and private, since your chats, repo data, and settings are stored locally on your PC in a small local database rather than on any company's servers. AI requests go straight from your computer to Anthropic's API. Under the hood, the backend runs only on your own machine, listening on your local network address. A small launcher program publishes that local server to the internet through a temporary tunnel and registers it with a public relay server, so your phone can reach a stable address that always points at your current PC session. The relay only forwards traffic and never sees your AI credentials or your data. Communication between the app and your PC is end to end encrypted using a key that is shared only inside the pairing QR code itself, never sent over the network, so even the relay server cannot read what passes through it. If you want full control over that routing layer too, you can run your own relay instead of the shared one. To use it you need the Bun JavaScript runtime, an active Claude subscription signed in through the Claude CLI, and the Portable mobile app, which you either build yourself with Expo or install from the team's published build. Two other tools, a tunnel program called cloudflared and a Chromium browser, are downloaded automatically the first time you run it, so you generally do not need to install them yourself.