Use Rig on your iPhone

Rig for iPhone is the pocket companion to Rig on your Mac or Windows PC. It shows you which of your machines are online, lets you start, stop and restart projects on them, alerts you when something goes down, and lets you ask your own setup what broke in plain English. Every action that changes something asks you to confirm first. This guide covers getting the app, pairing it with your machines, each of its main screens, and what it deliberately does not do.

What you need

• An iPhone running iOS 17 or later.
• A free Rig account, signed in on at least one Mac or Windows PC running Rig. The phone shows the machines on that account. See Create a Rig cloud account.
• For waking machines and reaching them over Mesh, a Mesh that includes those machines. Rig’s free plan includes one linked machine; more need Pro or Team. See Plans, billing and limits.

Get the app and sign in

1. Open userig.app/download on your iPhone and follow the App Store link. The app is listed as UseRig, and its icon on your home screen is labelled RIG.
2. Open it and sign in with the same Rig account you use on your computers. You can use your password, a passkey, or Face ID once it is set up. If your account has two step sign in turned on, the app asks for your code.
3. Allow notifications when asked, if you want alerts when a project goes down.

Pair the phone with your Mesh

Signing in shows your machines and their projects, because they sync through your account. To control them live, wake them, or reach them over your private Mesh network, also pair the phone. Pairing needs a code shown on one of your own computers, so the phone can only ever join machines you can sit in front of.

1. On your Mac or PC, open Devices in Rig and find Pair iPhone. Rig shows a short code, valid for about 15 minutes, and a Show QR button.
2. In the iPhone app, choose Add machine, then scan the QR code or type the code.
3. If iOS asks for permission to add a network configuration, allow it. Rig uses it only to reach your own paired machines. It is not a VPN for browsing and it does not route your other traffic.
4. The phone now appears next to your machines on your Mac, your PC and the account dashboard.

Fleet home

The first screen is your fleet: every Mac and PC on your account, each marked online, asleep or unreachable. Online means Rig is running and answering. Asleep means the machine is on your Mesh but sleeping; if another of your machines is awake on the same network, you can wake it from here. Unreachable means Rig cannot hear from it at all, for example because it is switched off, offline or Rig was quit. Tap a machine to see its projects.

Projects

The projects list shows what is running and what is stopped on each machine. Tap a project for its detail page, where you can start, stop or restart it and read its recent logs. Every one of those actions opens a confirm sheet that names the project and the machine, and nothing happens until you confirm. After a restart, the app tells you whether the project came back healthy.

Alerts

Push alerts tell you when a project goes down, when a machine drops offline, and similar problems, without opening the app. You choose which alerts you get and can set quiet hours so the phone stays silent overnight. Tap an alert to open the project, see what happened, and restart it with the same confirm sheet. Actions you start from a notification, a Live Activity or a home screen widget always go through that confirm sheet too. There is no silent remote stop.

Ask Rig

Ask Rig is a chat with your own setup. Ask things like “why did the queue worker on the studio Mac stop?” or “what is running on my laptop?”. It reads the same live status and logs that Rig shows on the computer and answers in plain English. If the answer involves doing something, such as restarting a project, it offers the action as a button, and the button still opens the confirm sheet. Ask Rig never changes anything on its own.

Ghost: pick up an AI chat on your phone

If you are working with an AI assistant on your computer, such as Claude Code or Cursor linked to Rig, you can hand the conversation to your phone and carry on from the sofa or the train. Ask the assistant to publish a Ghost session. It uses Rig’s publish_ghost_session tool, which asks you to approve it in Rig on the computer first. Then open Ask Rig on the phone and look under Ghost. The session arrives with the recent messages, so you can see where you were and keep asking questions. Both the computer and the phone need to be signed in to the same Rig account.

Privacy and safety

• The app only reaches machines on your own account that you paired.
• Your source code never goes to the phone or to our servers. The app sees project names, status, ports and the log lines you open.
• If your phone is lost, sign in to your account dashboard from a computer, open Devices and remove the phone. It is cut off from your machines straight away.

What the iPhone app is not

• It is not a replacement for Rig on your computer. The desktop app does the real work; the phone is the remote control.
• It is not a code editor, and it is not a way to reach anyone else’s computers.
• There is no Apple Watch or Vision Pro version, and no Android app yet.
• You cannot buy or change a Rig plan inside the app. Use your account dashboard in a browser.

Troubleshooting

• A machine is missing. Check that the computer is signed in to the same Rig account, under Settings → Cloud account in Rig.
• A machine shows as unreachable. Make sure Rig is running on it and it has internet access. Closing Rig’s window is fine, but quitting Rig stops the phone from reaching it.
• Wake does nothing. Waking needs another of your machines awake on the same network to send the signal. See Wake a sleeping Mac.
• No alerts arrive. Check notifications are allowed for the app in iOS Settings, and that quiet hours are not on.

Still stuck? See How to get help, and mention that you are using the iPhone app and which iOS version it runs.

https://userig.app/docs/iphone-app