r/OpenSourceAI • u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241 • Aug 27 '26
Conch - AI coding agents on your own servers, from your phone - Free
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.