Claude on mobile - what actually works, and what needs your laptop awake

Cowork is on the phone now. It is genuinely useful, and it is useful for a narrower set of things than the announcement implies. This page is the practical version: what works away from your desk, what quietly stops working, and how to set it up so the difference does not surprise you at the wrong moment.

The one distinction that explains everything

There are two kinds of thing a Claude setup can depend on, and mobile treats them completely differently.

Remote things travel. A connector served over HTTPS, and the skills and knowledge behind it, follow your account. Sign in on a phone and they are there, with no extra setup and no sync step.

Local things stay. Anything that reads your hard drive is bound to the machine that has the hard drive. Anthropic is explicit about the boundary:

Local connectors and plugins that include local MCP servers work through the desktop app only.

If you remember one line from this page, that is the one. It decides everything else.

The conditional middle

Between those two there is one important case, and it is the one people get caught by.

Your connected folders are reachable from a phone, but only under a condition:

A cloud session can read and write files in folders you’ve connected on your computer only while the desktop app is open on that computer.

So a phone can genuinely work with your files, as long as the machine holding them is awake and running Claude. Close the lid on the train and you keep the methods and lose the memory. Nothing breaks, nothing errors dramatically - it simply behaves like a very well-briefed colleague who has not read today’s brief.

Plan around that rather than discovering it in a taxi.

Setting it up

1. Check your plan covers it. Cowork on mobile is available on Pro, Max and Team plans, and on Enterprise where an admin has enabled it. If you already run Claude on a paid plan you almost certainly have it.

2. Install or update the Claude app. Cowork lives inside the existing Claude for iOS and Claude for Android apps rather than as a separate download.

3. Add your remote connectors at claude.ai. Connectors are added once in Settings and then follow your account to every surface, phone included. A remote MCP server is added by its HTTPS URL.

4. Decide what your phone needs to reach. If you only need methods and knowledge, a remote connector is enough and you are finished. If you need your own files, they have to be in a folder connected on your computer.

5. Leave the desktop app open for file access. A cloud session reaches your connected folders only while the desktop app is running on that computer. Shut it and file access stops until it is open again.

6. Use the phone for capture, not production. Catch the idea, ask the question, start the thread. Build at a desk.

Why this works cleanly for Corey

Corey was built in two halves before mobile was a consideration, which is the only reason it moves onto a phone without ceremony.

The brain - skills, methods, knowledge - is a remote MCP server. Identical for everyone using it, containing nothing about any particular business. Because it is remote rather than local, it is simply a connector, and connectors work on mobile.

The context - your numbers, your customers, your decisions - is a plain-text folder on your own machine. It never travels to us. That is a deliberate boundary rather than a limitation, and it is exactly why the phone case is well-behaved: there is no server-side copy of your business to accidentally expose, and no local dependency to break.

Nothing was re-engineered for this. The split was already there for a different reason.

What a phone is genuinely good at

Not sustained work. Nobody has ever done their best thinking on a phone, and “working from my phone” is, for most people, scrolling something with the texture of work and the output of none.

What a phone is unreasonably good at is catching a thought before it dies. The idea in the taxi. The thing you realise in the shower and have lost by the time you find a towel. The moment you notice the pricing page has been wrong for four months.

Those thoughts have a half-life of minutes. If catching one needs a laptop, you will not catch it.

So the useful division is not desk versus mobile. It is capture versus build. Capture on the phone. Build at the desk.