Run Crush on Your Phone (iPhone + Android)

You can run Crush on your phone today. Crush is Charm's terminal AI coding agent, and it has no mobile app, so "Crush on a phone" means running its CLI inside a terminal. The fastest path: install Cosyra for iOS or Cosyra for Android, then add Crush to your Ubuntu 24.04 container with one command, npm install -g @charmland/crush. On Android you can also run it locally in Termux. Sign up gets you 1 hour of free compute, no credit card.

This guide was written by the Cosyra team. We do not pre-install Crush, so we tested the install path the way you would run it: on 2026-06-12 we ran npm install -g @charmland/crush in a clean Ubuntu 24.04 x86_64 container with Node v20.20.2, and it placed the crush binary at /usr/bin/crush reporting v0.76.0. We verified the license, provider list, and supported-OS facts the same day against the charmbracelet/crush repo and charm.land.

What is Crush?

Crush is the terminal coding agent from Charm (Charmbracelet), the team behind Bubble Tea, Glow, and the rest of the glamourous terminal-UI ecosystem. It is a single Go binary, source-available under FSL-1.1-MIT, with 25,661 stars on GitHub and a current release of v0.79.1 dated 2026-06-20 (both verified 2026-06-24). One nuance worth pinning down: source-available is not the same as OSI open source. FSL-1.1-MIT lets you use the code freely and converts each release to MIT after two years, but until then it restricts using Crush to build a competing product. If you have seen it called "open source" elsewhere, that phrasing is imprecise.

What makes Crush a good fit for a phone is exactly what it is: a clean terminal binary with no GUI dependency. It talks to 20+ model providers through BYOK, reads your code through the Language Server Protocol for real structural context, connects to MCP servers, and keeps per-project session history. There is no Crush iOS or Android app, and there is no hosted Crush environment. You supply the machine the binary runs on. That is the whole reason this guide exists: the gap between "Crush supports Android" (it lists Android because the Go binary runs in a Linux userland) and "there is a Crush phone app" (there is not) is where people get stuck.

How can you run Crush on a phone?

You can run Crush on a phone three ways: a cloud Ubuntu container reached from a native mobile app where you add Crush in one command (Cosyra), Termux on Android where you install it locally, or Blink Shell on iOS into a VPS you run it on yourself. Crush needs a terminal that can execute a Linux binary, so every path puts the crush process on a real Linux shell and gives your phone a way to drive it. All three are current as of 2026-06-12.

1. Cosyra: cloud Ubuntu container, add Crush in one command

This is what we built, and it is the path we recommend for most people. A native iOS and Android terminal connects to a persistent Ubuntu 24.04 x86_64 container. We ship Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, and Gemini CLI on the image; Crush is not on that list, so you add it with npm install -g @charmland/crush and it sticks on your home volume. We think a one-command add is the right trade-off rather than bloating the base image with every agent that exists. Some people want their favourite agent baked in; we would rather keep the image lean and let you pick.

• Works when: you want both iOS and Android from the same container, a session that survives the app closing, and no home machine to keep awake.
• Breaks when: you have no internet, since the container lives in the cloud and we have no offline mode. Honest trade-off list in Cosyra vs Termux.
• Cost: 1 hour free on signup, no credit card. Extend with a 10-hour, 7-day trial when you want more, then $29.99/month. Crush itself is free; you pay your provider for tokens. See pricing.

2. Termux on Android, fully local

Install Termux from F-Droid, run pkg install nodejs, then npm install -g @charmland/crush, and Crush runs on the phone with no cloud bill. Crush is a Go binary, so unlike some Node and Python agents it does not fight Termux's aarch64 userland over native build steps. If you want the broader picture of running a real Linux environment on Android, including the proot-distro route, see Linux Container on Android: 3 Real Options in 2026.

• Works when: you are on Android, you want a fully local setup, and you accept provisioning and maintaining Termux yourself.
• Breaks when: Android 12+'s phantom process killer terminates a long agent run, or your default Termux storage gets wiped. Long sessions are the weak spot.
• Cost: free Crush binary, free Termux. The cost is your time maintaining the environment between updates.

3. SSH from Blink Shell into your own VPS (iOS only)

On iPhone or iPad there is no terminal that runs arbitrary Linux binaries, so the local route does not exist. The classic path is Blink Shell into a VPS: spin up a box (Hetzner, Scaleway, DigitalOcean), install Node, npm install -g @charmland/crush, SSH in inside a tmux session, and run crush.

• Works when: you want a box that is yours and an iOS-native keyboard.
• Breaks when: you do not want to be a sysadmin. Patching, firewall rules, and backups are on you for a box that holds your source and your provider keys.
• Cost: Blink Shell is $19.99/year, the VPS is $5 to $40/month. No Android equivalent; Blink is iOS-only.

How do you set up Crush on iPhone or Android?

You set up Crush on iPhone or Android in about four minutes with Cosyra: install the app, sign in, add the crush binary with one command, export a provider key, clone a repo, run crush. No Node install of your own, no arch mismatches.

Step 1: Install Cosyra and sign in

Download from the App Store or Google Play. Sign in with Apple, Google, or email. On first launch we provision a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 x86_64 container with Node 20+ already on the PATH.

Step 2: Add Crush with one command

Crush is not one of our four pre-installed agents, so add it yourself. This is the exact command we ran in a clean container on 2026-06-12.

Step 3: Connect a provider key (BYOK)

Crush is model-agnostic. Export the key for whichever provider you use and append it to ~/.bashrc so every session can reach it. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and 20+ others are supported, and you can switch model mid-session.

Step 4: Run your first Crush session

Crush reads the repo through LSP, proposes diffs, and waits for your approval before writing. Because it keeps per-project session history, switching repos and coming back later picks up where you left off.

What does a Crush session on a phone look like?

The thing Crush unlocks on a phone is the mid-session provider switch plus the Charm TUI, which is genuinely pleasant to drive with a thumb. Two sessions we actually run from a phone.

Switch providers on the same bug, on the train

You have a flaky test and twenty minutes on the train. Open Cosyra, cd into the repo, run crush, paste the failing test and the suspect file, and ask for a root cause with the Anthropic model. Not convinced? Switch the model inside the same session to an OpenAI or Gemini endpoint and ask again, keeping the context. The single TUI is what makes that comparison quick on a small screen.

Read-only repo audit from the couch

Saturday, a coworker shipped something Friday and you are curious from the couch. Run crush in the repo and ask it to summarize the structure, flag the riskiest files, and propose what you would change before touching anything. The LSP context means it is reading real symbols, not just grepping text. For other agents that fit this same couch-coding slot, the AI coding agents on mobile pillar walks through each one.

What are the real limits of running Crush on a phone?

The honest limits: no offline mode on the cloud path, you maintain the box on the local and VPS paths, and Crush is BYOK so your provider's rate limits and bill are yours.

• No offline mode on Cosyra. The container and your provider both live in the cloud. No internet, no Crush. If you code on planes with no wifi, the Termux-local path fits that slot better for the editing parts.
• Termux long sessions are fragile. Android 12+'s phantom process killer can terminate a running agent, and default storage is ephemeral. Provisioning is on you.
• BYOK means your bill. Crush is free software, but the model tokens are billed by Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google directly. We do not proxy or meter that.
• Source-available, not open source. FSL-1.1-MIT restricts competing commercial use for two years before converting to MIT. If a strict OSI license matters to you, that is a real distinction.

How does Cosyra compare to Termux and Blink+VPS for Crush?

Cosyra wins for dual-platform and a session that survives the app closing; Termux wins if you want a fully local Android setup with no cloud bill; Blink-plus-VPS wins on iOS if you want a box you own. None is strictly best. Comparison as of 2026-06-12. For the full head-to-head of a hosted container against running the Crush binary on your own machine, read Cosyra vs Crush.

Crush joins a crowded shelf of terminal agents you can run this way. The same one-command-on-a-container pattern works for the agent we do pre-install by default in OpenCode on phone, for Anthropic's Claude Code on phone, and for the broader set of terminal UIs covered in TUI apps on your phone.

Frequently asked questions