Image: GitHub
Why it mattersA developer can now script iPhone actions from Claude Code without a jailbreak or a cloud phone farm. Local USB pairing is enough.
A developer who wants a coding agent to open an app on a real iPhone has had two bad choices. Jailbreak the phone, or send its screen to a cloud phone farm. On 5 November 2026 a new open-source project called Poki added a third. It is a Model Context Protocol server that runs on a Mac and drives an iPhone over USB. The repository picked up 379 stars in its first twenty-four hours.
Poki is MIT-adjacent AGPL-3.0 licensed and lives on GitHub as JosssphZhou/poki. It needs macOS 15 or later with a full Xcode install. It needs Rust and Node.js 24 or newer. It needs FFmpeg. A physical iPhone is paired over USB with Developer Mode on. No jailbreak is required.
What the agent can actually do
Any Model Context Protocol client can talk to Poki. The README names Claude Code and Codex. Once the server is up, the agent can act on the phone. A prompt like "search Safari for today's news" becomes a sequence of taps on a real device. The project also comes with Telegram and iMessage support. A Tailscale connection lets the Mac host the phone and the agent run elsewhere.
The README describes a feature called self-learning routes. A route is a recorded path an agent takes to finish a task. On the second run, Poki replays the route instead of re-planning it. The claim is unmeasured in the README. Any team testing it should log the token count on first run and on fifth run of the same task.
Who this helps right now
The practical reader is a mobile developer who already uses Claude Code or Cursor on a Mac. They write an app for iOS. They want their coding agent to install a build and open a screen. They want it to run through a flow and return a screenshot or a log. Today that work is a human tapping. With Poki, it is the agent tapping.
The second reader is a quality-assurance engineer. Automated iOS testing today runs on simulators or in cloud phone farms. Both have limits. A simulator cannot test push notifications or cameras. A cloud farm charges by the hour and sees the device remotely. Poki runs on a laptop and uses a phone sitting on the desk.
What is still unproven
Three limits are worth stating. First, the project is one day old. The author has committed 23 times to main. A tool this fresh will break. Second, the self-learning claim is the author's. No external benchmark has measured whether token spend falls on repeated runs. Third, AGPL-3.0 is a strict open-source licence. A company building a closed product on top of Poki should check with a lawyer before release. The ecosystem is small. A related repository, phone-harness/mcp, built 722 stars over 30 days doing the same job for iPhone and Android. Poki's 24-hour growth is the signal worth watching.
Source
- JosssphZhou/poki, GitHub
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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