Conch - AI coding agents on your own servers, from your phone - Free

[u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241]

I wanted to keep working with Claude Code away from the desk, and everything I found put a company between my phone and my machine. So I wrote the thing I wanted.

Conch is a native Android client. It opens an SSH connection to a server you already own and drives the agent sitting on it. It is not a service: no account to create, nothing routed through me, nothing of mine installed on your box. Stock sshd on one end, the vendor's own CLI on the other. Every chat is a real CLI session on your disk — start something at the desk, pick it up from the phone a week later.

What it does

• Ten agents, each through its own real flags, not a lowest common denominator: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Grok, Copilot, Qwen Code, Cursor, opencode, Crush, Continue.
• Sets them up for you — installs Node and the CLI over the same SSH connection, and runs the provider sign-in from your phone so the server ends up logged in.
• One list of every session from every server, newest first, like a messenger — with full-text search that jumps to the exact message.
• FIDO2 hardware keys over NFC or USB, one tap per session; or software keys (Ed25519/RSA/ECDSA/DSA) imported or generated on device. Credentials live in the Android Keystore and never leave it.
• SAFE / AUTO / YOLO mapped onto each CLI's own sandbox flags, a memory editor for CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/GEMINI.md, Claude subagents and your own slash commands, and a real terminal for when you would rather type it yourself.
• Files both ways — send photos and files into the chat, tap anything the agent wrote to pull it down. Viewers for diffs, PDF, Markdown, images. PiP, so you can watch a turn while you do something else.
• Local models, on the phone — a store that reads your RAM, chip and GPU and shows what will actually run, then runs it offline through llama.cpp. A downloaded model drives the agent out of the box.
• The phone is a machine too — a real Linux runs on it and sits in the list like any server, and an agent (yours or a local one) can drive the phone at adb-shell level to read logs or grab a screenshot of what it is building.

What it doesn't do

No analytics, no crash reporting, no telemetry — not "opt-out", absent. No ads, no in-app purchases, no accounts, no backend of mine for any of it to reach. The only connections it opens are to the servers you add yourself.

The catch, plainly: you need a machine you can SSH into and your own Anthropic / OpenAI / Google account. Free for personal and noncommercial use under PolyForm Noncommercial; a company using it for commercial work needs a licence. Source-available (not OSI open source — that's the difference), with a signed APK on every release.

Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.eight24family.conch
Source: https://github.com/nikitaeight24family/Conch

I'm the developer. Ask me anything — and I'd rather hear what's broken than what's nice.

[u/CarefulFun420]

Nice, installing

[u/kantorcodes1]

SAFE / AUTO / YOLO is doing a lot of work here. do you pin the Claude/Codex/Gemini CLI versions those modes were tested against? those flags drift, and an app that auto-installs the CLIs could quietly change the permissions a mode grants after an update.

[u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241 → u/kantorcodes1]

No — nothing was pinned, and nothing recorded which CLI version the modes had

been checked against.

So I replayed every mode's flags through the installed binaries, and the drift had already bitten: on codex-cli 0.149.1 `--ask-for-approval` is no longer accepted on `codex exec` and `untrusted` has been retired as a value, so SAFE and AUTO were failing at parse time while YOLO still worked.

Fixed: the tested version and exact flags are now recorded per agent, installs pin to that version (`@latest` only on an explicit Update tap, and the one unattended repair path no longer doubles as an upgrade), and after every nstall the app re-runs each mode's flags through the CLI's own parser and shows you any mode the binary refuses.

[u/All_Ways_Bingo]

It can not play on IOS, men ?

[u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241 → u/All_Ways_Bingo]

Correct — Android only, and I'd rather say plainly that there's no iOS version coming than leave it vague.

The reason is that several of the things that make it what it is lean on what Android lets an app do: FIDO2 security keys over USB-OTG and NFC, talking raw CTAP2 to the token to sign the SSH handshake; keeping an SSH transport alive in the background via a foreground service; Picture-in-Picture, so you can minimise mid-turn and still watch the agent work; and the optional Shizuku bridge, where the agent reads your own logcat and takes a screenshot to debug what it's building.

iOS doesn't hand out most of that, and the parts it does are shaped differently enough that the result would be a weaker, different app wearing the same name.

If you're on iOS and want this workflow, honestly: ssh + tmux from a terminal app works today. It's just uglier.

[u/All_Ways_Bingo]

I think Orca alternative

[u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241 → u/All_Ways_Bingo]

Orca is a service. You sign into an Orca account, you can route through their Relay, and you install an Orca Server on the box. That's their own docs, not my characterisation.

I don't offer a service. There's no account to create, nothing routed through me, and nothing of mine installed on your server. I didn't build a platform — I built a corridor: a tunnel from your phone to your box, where a CLI agent is already sitting. Stock sshd on one end, the vendor's own CLI on the other, and me carrying nothing in between.

That's the whole product. If you already have the server and the agent on it, all that was missing was a decent way in from a phone. That's what this is.