Review Pull Requests From Your Phone (iPhone + Android)

You can review pull requests from your phone, and how far you get depends on what "review" means. The GitHub mobile app handles the quick version — read the diff, comment, approve or request changes. For a real review — check out the branch, run the tests, run an AI agent over the diff — you need a shell, which a phone gets through a cloud Linux container. Install Cosyra for iOS or Cosyra for Android, then gh pr checkout 123 and review like you would on a laptop.

This guide was written by the Cosyra team. We review PRs from a phone on the on-call rotation, and we checked the capabilities and commands here against primary sources on 2026-06-08: GitHub's mobile docs and changelog, the GitHub CLI manual, and the CodeRabbit and Copilot code-review docs.

What can the GitHub mobile app actually do?

Quite a lot, within a clear boundary: it is built for review and triage, not execution. According to GitHub's mobile documentation, you can read, review, and collaborate on issues and pull requests, and edit files in a PR. The 2024 "enhanced code review" update lets you start, continue, and submit reviews on the go, so approving and requesting changes work well from the app.

• It does well: reading diffs, leaving line comments, approving, requesting changes, managing notifications, light file edits.
• It does not do: check out a branch, run the code, run tests or a linter, or run an AI agent over a working tree. There is no terminal.
• Watch the cap: the improved files-changed view (public preview, June 2025) is limited to 300 files, so very large PRs are awkward to read on the phone surface.

If your review is "I read it, looks good, approve," the app is the right tool and you can stop here. The rest of this guide is for when reading is not enough.

Why does real review need a shell?

A thorough review often means doing things, not just reading. You want to reproduce the bug the PR claims to fix, run the test suite against the branch to confirm it is green, run the linter and build to catch what CI config might miss, and trace the most critical path in the diff from input to output in context. As GitHub itself put it in May 2026, automated tools handle the mechanical pass, but judgment — does this change actually do the right thing — stays with the human reviewer. Judgment is easier when you can run the thing.

None of that fits in a phone diff viewer. All of it fits in a terminal with the branch checked out. That is the whole idea here: give the phone a real shell on a real Linux box.

How do you review a pull request from your phone with Cosyra?

The workflow is the same six steps you would run on a laptop, done from a native app against a persistent container: authenticate gh, check out the PR, run the tests, optionally run an agent over the diff, and submit the review.

Step 1: Install Cosyra and sign in

Download from the App Store or Google Play. The Ubuntu 24.04 container already has git, the GitHub CLI, and the AI coding CLIs installed.

Step 2: Authenticate the GitHub CLI

Run gh auth login and pick the device-code flow. It prints a one-time code; open github.com/login/device in the phone's browser, paste the code, and the CLI picks up the token — no desktop browser needed. For automation, export GH_TOKEN=... works instead.

Step 3: Check out the pull request branch

List open PRs, then check one out by number. gh pr diff and gh pr view show the change and its description right in the terminal.

Step 4: Run the tests, linter, and build

This is the step the GitHub app cannot do. Install dependencies and run the project's commands against the checked-out branch to confirm the change works.

Step 5: Run an AI agent over the diff

Point an agent at the branch for a first pass on the things that are easy to miss on a small screen. The agents are pre-installed; you describe the focus.

Step 6: Submit your review

Post the review with one command. It lands on GitHub exactly as a laptop review would.

AI code review tools you can run from the terminal

Three options, all usable from a phone-reached shell, each with a different shape:

GitHub Copilot code review

GitHub's native AI reviewer has been generally available since April 2025 and viewable on GitHub Mobile since July 2025. You assign Copilot as a reviewer and it comments server-side, so the results show up on the phone — but it runs against GitHub's copy of the PR, not a branch you have running locally. Note that as of June 1, 2026, Copilot code review consumes Actions minutes / AI Credits.

CodeRabbit CLI

CodeRabbit's CLI runs AI reviews directly in the terminal and is designed to work alongside coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor CLI. Install with curl -fsSL https://cli.coderabbit.ai/install.sh | sh, then cr auth login. The free tier allows three reviews per hour, and it reviews local changes, which pairs well with a checked-out PR.

A coding agent over the working tree

The most flexible option is the one in Step 5: gh pr checkout the branch, then run Claude Code or Codex CLI with a review prompt. Because the branch is on disk, the agent can read every file, not just the diff, and you can ask follow-up questions about specific functions. If the PR you are vetting was opened by an asynchronous agent like Jules — Google's cloud agent that hands you a pull request but no terminal — this checkout-and-review loop is exactly the surface you use to read its work properly from the phone.

What are the real limits?

• No offline mode. The container is in the cloud; reviewing on a plane without wifi is out.
• Typing long review comments on glass is slow. Voice dictation or a Bluetooth keyboard helps; so does letting the agent draft the comment and editing it down.
• Huge diffs are still huge. A 4,000-line PR is hard to review anywhere; the phone does not make that easier, though running the tests at least tells you if it works.
• AI review is a first pass, not a sign-off. It catches mechanical issues; the judgment call stays yours.

GitHub app vs Cosyra vs Codespaces for PR review

The GitHub app is best for a quick comment-and-approve, Cosyra is best for a full review you can run and test from a native app, and Codespaces gives you a full environment but only through a browser tab. Verified 2026-06-08.

For the broader comparison with GitHub's own cloud environments, see Cosyra vs GitHub Codespaces on mobile. This workflow is the same one our on-call engineers use when a PR needs eyes at an awkward hour, and it builds on the agents covered in AI coding agents on mobile. If you would rather SSH into your own box to do the same thing, see SSH from your phone.

Frequently asked questions