Account & history
Sign in once; your threads, Projects, and any Artifacts you've built on the web appear immediately. Conversations sync bidirectionally — start one on the phone, finish on the laptop.
A native iPhone and iPad app, same account as claude.ai, same conversation history, same Plus/Pro/Max plan limits — wrapped in the parts of iOS that turn out to matter most: voice, the camera, the Share Sheet, and the way you can hand a thread off between the phone in your hand and the laptop on your desk.
This page is the complete guide: install and sign-in, voice mode (the part that changes how you use Claude), camera input, the Share Sheet, iPad-specific patterns, cross-device continuity, plans & limits, recipes that pay off in real life, what's harder than on the web, and troubleshooting.
Open claude.ai/download → routes to the App StoreClaude on iOS is the same product as claude.ai at the model layer — same Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku underneath — exposed through a native app that can use the hardware and the OS surfaces the web can't. Practically that means three big things: voice, the camera, and the Share Sheet. Everything else (themes, threads, attachments, Artifacts, Projects) carries over from the web.
Sign in once; your threads, Projects, and any Artifacts you've built on the web appear immediately. Conversations sync bidirectionally — start one on the phone, finish on the laptop.
Free, Pro, Max — whatever you pay for on claude.ai applies on iOS. There's no separate "mobile tier"; usage on the phone counts against the same monthly cap.
The model picker is the same set — Sonnet by default, Opus when you want depth, Haiku when you want speed. The app does not lock you into a "mobile model."
Talk to Claude the way you'd talk to someone on the phone. Interrupt, change your mind mid-sentence, ask follow-ups while walking. The headline feature of the mobile app.
Tap the camera, point it at something, ask. No save-to-photos-then-upload round-trip. The friction of "ask Claude about the world in front of you" drops to two taps.
Every iOS app's Share button now has Claude as a destination. Pipe an article, a PDF, a screenshot, a YouTube link, a calendar invite — anywhere you can hit Share, you can hand to Claude.
The web is the headquarters; the iOS app is the field kit. If you spend most of your day at a desk, you'll still do the heavy lifting on the web — long writing, deep research, code review, Artifacts editing. The app is for the in-between moments: the walk where an idea catches you, the line at the post office, the cooking improvisation, the conversation with someone whose photo of a thing you'd like Claude to explain. People who never install it underuse the product; people who install it without changing their habits get a Safari-shaped chat app and shrug.
Free download, sign in with the same email you use on claude.ai, optionally enable Face ID. Two minutes from tap to typing.
Voice mode is the single biggest reason to install the app. Press the voice button and you're in a real-time conversation: speak, Claude listens, Claude speaks back, you can interrupt at any time. The phone's microphone and speaker do the work; the model is the same one you'd talk to via the web.
The walk to lunch is twenty minutes of thinking time you weren't going to type out. Voice converts that to a real conversation: a problem you're chewing on, a plan you want to talk through, a draft you'd rather hear than write.
Spoken language is sloppier than written language — and that's a feature when you're exploring. Saying "uh, can we just walk through the X thing… no wait, actually the bigger question is" works in voice and would feel weird typed. Claude follows the drift.
Use voice as a smarter dictaphone — talk for two minutes, ask Claude to summarise back the key points, then iterate from there. Beats voice memos that just sit in a list.
Cooking, driving (as passenger), walking the dog, sitting in a hot tub, painting. Anywhere the typing pose is impossible, voice is the entire interface.
Just talk. The app uses voice-activity detection — when you start speaking, Claude stops. You don't need to wait for it to finish a paragraph. That's the unlock that makes the conversation feel real instead of like a one-way recital: you can redirect mid-sentence the way you would with a person.
try_files directive?" works typed; spoken, the speech-to-text often hears it wrong and Claude answers a slightly different question.If you keep talking through Claude's answer, the app keeps interpreting you as the active speaker. A two-second pause lets the answer breathe and Claude finish a thought — you'll get more depth that way.
"I'm going for a walk and want to think about how to structure the new tenant agreement — push back on me as I go" beats "what should I do about the tenant agreement?" The frame tells Claude what kind of conversation you want.
Just say it. Voice mode handles "scratch that," "no, the OTHER thing," "back up to where I said X" cleanly. You don't have to start the conversation over.
End every long voice conversation with "summarise what we decided" or "write me three bullet points to put in tomorrow's notes." That gives you a written artefact from a spoken thread.
Tap the camera icon in the chat. Frame whatever you want to ask about. Hit the shutter. The photo lands in the chat with whatever message you type after — or speak, if you're in voice mode at the same time. This is the closest the product gets to "Claude can see what you see," and it's worth taking the friction-free version of that seriously.
A wine label in a language you don't speak. The ingredients list on a snack you're not sure about. A menu in a country whose script you can't read. Snap it, ask "what is this." Often more useful than a translation app because Claude explains, not just translates.
"What's this plant in my yard?" "Is this mushroom safe?" (you'd verify with a local expert, but Claude is a good first cut.) "What bird makes this nest?" The hit rate is high enough to be useful and Claude is honest when it's uncertain.
Snap a photo of the problem, ask Claude to walk you through it, then ask for a similar problem to verify you understood. Especially useful for parents helping with homework on subjects they last touched twenty years ago.
A circuit breaker that won't reset. A check-engine light combination. A misbehaving thermostat. Photograph what you're looking at and let Claude work through it with you.
A stuck error message on your kid's laptop across the room. The settings page of an unfamiliar smart-home device. Photograph the screen, ask "what should I tap next."
End-of-meeting whiteboard photo → ask Claude to transcribe and clean it up into bullet notes. Sketch of an idea → ask Claude to react to it like a colleague.
The combination is genuinely under-used. Walk into your garage. Tap the voice button. Tap the camera button. Say "okay so you can see the back-left corner — I'm trying to figure out where to put a workbench that doesn't block the breaker panel — what do you think?" Claude has both the image and the spoken context. It's a conversation about a place, not a query about a photo.
The iOS app is universal — same binary runs on iPhone and iPad. On iPad it adapts: wider thread list, bigger composer, keyboard shortcuts, and (most importantly) it sits comfortably alongside other apps in Split View.
On iPad the thread list lives in a left sidebar; the chat fills the rest. Easier to jump between conversations than on iPhone's drawer.
Run Claude alongside Safari, Notes, or Files. Drag a PDF from Files directly into the Claude composer to attach it. The same workflow as "open two browser tabs" but with a real drag target between them.
With a Magic Keyboard or Smart Folio: ⌘+N for new chat, ⌘+K for chat search, ⌘+↩ to send. Hold ⌘ in the app to see the full list — it varies a bit by version.
Markup a screenshot before sending — circle the bit you want Claude to look at, scribble a question next to it, hit Share to Claude. Annotation tools live in the iOS Markup overlay, not in Claude itself, but the annotated image lands in the chat with your scribbles visible.
The iPad with a keyboard sits between phone and laptop in a way that suits Claude well. Long enough threads to feel substantial; light enough to read on the couch; close enough to a laptop to draft real prose without thumbs cramping. If you have an iPad and only use it for video, try a week of using it as your primary Claude surface for reading-and-thinking sessions — the laptop tends to drift back to email.
Conversations sync to the cloud the moment you send a message. Switch to claude.ai on a laptop and the same thread is there, current, ready to continue. This is the second-most-important thing about the app after voice — it means the app isn't a separate experience, it's a window into your existing Claude world.
| Item | iPhone/iPad ↔ Web | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Threads | ✓ live sync | Both directions. Within seconds. |
| Voice transcripts | ✓ as text | A voice conversation on iOS shows up as text on the web. |
| Projects & project knowledge | ✓ synced | Add a project file on the web; the iOS thread inside that Project has it. |
| Artifacts | ✓ readable | You can view them on iOS; editing complex Artifacts is easier on the web. |
| Custom instructions | ✓ synced | Set once on either surface; applied everywhere. |
| Theme | ~ per device | iOS follows your system theme by default; web has its own setting. |
| Camera photos | ✓ visible | Photos you snapped in the iOS app are visible on the web in the same thread. |
Start on the phone with a quick voice or camera capture; the moment you're at a keyboard, switch to the web. Reverse for going out — finalise something on the laptop, then carry it on the phone (voice follow-ups, share-sheet edits). The pattern that doesn't work is doing dense work on the phone — long writing, code review, anything that needs many keystrokes. Hand off rather than fight the form factor.
Everything you say to Claude — typed, spoken, photographed, shared — leaves the phone. The model isn't on the device; the inference runs in Anthropic's data centres. That's a feature (the model is bigger than any phone could hold) and a thing to be aware of (treat the app like the web, not like an offline notepad).
Settings → Privacy → enable biometric lock. Anyone who picks up your unlocked phone still can't see Claude without your face/fingerprint. Light defence but worth it.
Long-press a thread in the sidebar → Delete. It's removed from your account everywhere — phone, web, anyone else's view of a shared one. Verify with the web at the same time if you're paranoid.
iOS Settings → Notifications → Claude. Turn off lock-screen previews if you don't want message snippets visible when the phone's face-up.
iOS Settings → Claude → toggle off Camera or Microphone. The app still works; you just lose that one feature. Re-enable any time.
The short answer: nothing. The iOS app uses your existing claude.ai plan, with the same limits, the same model availability, and the same upgrade path. Voice mode and camera input are not gated separately — if you have the app, you have them.
| Plan | Voice mode | Camera | Models | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | ✓ | ✓ | Sonnet | Daily cap (varies); you'll see a "back later" notice when you hit it |
| Pro | ✓ | ✓ | All models incl. Opus | Roughly 5× free, rolling 5-hour window |
| Max | ✓ | ✓ | All models, priority on Opus | Roughly 5× or 20× Pro, depending on tier |
| Team / Enterprise | ✓ | ✓ | Plan-defined | Per-seat caps, pooled by workspace |
Voice and camera count against the same usage budget as text messages — a long voice conversation uses more tokens than a one-line typed question. If you're heavily voice-driven on Free or Pro, you'll hit the cap faster than someone who only types.
When you're close to the cap, the app shows a banner with how much you have left. When you hit it, the next send is blocked with a message telling you when usage resets. Voice mode currently disables itself at the limit; text continues with the smaller model.
Each of these is a real use the phone is better at than the web — not because Claude is more powerful on iOS, but because the situation only happens away from the desk.
Set a 20-minute walk. Before you go: open Claude, voice button on, say "I'm going to walk and think out loud about <X>. Push back on me. Ask clarifying questions. Don't agree too easily. At the end, summarise what I actually decided."
Walk. Talk. Pause when you need to. Don't worry about the structure — Claude will follow it. When you get back to the desk, the transcript is there waiting; the summary at the end is your notes.
In the aisle. Camera mode. Photograph the ingredients on something unfamiliar. Ask "plain English: what is this, what's it for, anything I should avoid?" Faster than reading the label, way better than the brand's own marketing.
Kid stuck on a problem. Photograph it. "Don't give the answer. Walk me through how to think about it so I can explain it to a fourth-grader." You get a one-paragraph teaching script; the kid gets a parent who suddenly looks like they remember the math.
On the way to a meeting you forgot to prep for. Share the calendar invite to Claude. "I'm walking into this in fifteen minutes. Give me three things I should remember about the topic, two questions worth asking, and one thing I shouldn't commit to before I know more."
Read an article that mentions something interesting. Share it. "What's the thing behind the thing here — what would be the next two articles to read?" Better than auto-suggested links because Claude follows the actual thread of your interest.
Something is broken — a fixture, an appliance, the car. You don't know what the parts are called. Photograph it. "What am I looking at, what's likely wrong, and what would the part be called if I were ordering one?" Now you have the vocabulary to actually search.
Restaurant. Menu in Greek/Vietnamese/Hungarian. Snap it. "Translate this, and tell me which dishes I'd probably like if I usually order <X>." Translation apps stop at the words; Claude has an opinion.
Open the fridge. Photograph the contents. Voice: "I want to make dinner in thirty minutes. Walk me through one option using mostly what's here. Veto anything that needs an oven preheated more than ten minutes."
The app gives you voice, the camera, and the Share Sheet. It takes back some things in return. Knowing which is which keeps you from fighting the form factor.
Anything past two paragraphs feels cramped on iPhone. iPad with a keyboard is workable. The web is the right surface for drafting, editing, or anything where you'll iterate on the wording.
Reading code on a phone is doable; reviewing it isn't. The structure of code wants width — function signatures, indentation, side-by-side diff. Read summaries on the phone; do the actual review on the laptop.
Artifacts (HTML pages, React components, slide decks) render on iOS but the editing UX is far better on the web. Use mobile to view; switch surfaces to edit.
You can attach photos and shared files, but adding an arbitrary local file to a chat is fiddlier than on the web — it goes through the Files app rather than a drag-and-drop. For multi-file ingestion, prefer the web.
Easy on the web (two tabs). On iPhone it's a swipe-back-and-forth dance. iPad's Split View helps a bit if you use Claude alongside Claude (yes, you can).
Search works on iOS but the results UX is denser on the web. If you're hunting for "that thing I asked Claude about three months ago," start on the web.
If Claude isn't in the first row of your share targets, you'll use it 10× less. Drag it up once and you'll never look back.
"I'm going to think out loud about <X> — push back on me" beats "what should I do about <X>". You get a real conversation instead of an answer.
If you want more than a one-liner from voice mode, leave a beat of silence after your question. Otherwise Claude assumes you're still going.
"Summarise what we decided" turns a 15-minute walk into one paragraph of notes you can actually use.
Snap the photo, then speak your question. Faster than typing and lets you describe the context the photo doesn't show.
Take a screenshot, hit Markup, circle the part you want Claude to focus on. Then Share to Claude. The arrow does what a paragraph of "look at the bit in the top right" would have done.
If you've set up Projects on the web (with files and instructions), they're available on the phone. Use them to start mobile chats that already have context, instead of re-typing setup every time.
If you switch to another app, the voice session usually pauses or ends. If you need to look something up mid-conversation, ask Claude to look it up instead of switching out.
Voice for ideation, exploration, dictation. Type for anything precise, copy-able, or technical. Mixing them is the whole skill.
Cheap insurance. If you lose the phone unlocked, at least the Claude window doesn't open.
The laptop drifts back to email and the phone is cramped. iPad mode is the right surface for long-form Claude conversations you'd rather not have at a desk.
The banner is your meter. Voice burns through it faster than text — if you're a daily voice user, Pro pays for itself quickly.
| Symptom | Likely fix |
|---|---|
| Voice mode won't start. | Check iOS Settings → Claude → Microphone is enabled. Then restart the app. Voice mode also requires a connection — try briefly on Wi-Fi if cellular is flaky. |
| Camera button is greyed out. | iOS Settings → Claude → Camera. If it's denied, the button greys until you re-grant. |
| Share Sheet doesn't show Claude. | Open Safari → Share → scroll right → Edit Actions → enable Claude. If Claude isn't in the list, the app probably needs a launch first; open it, sign in, then re-check. |
| Thread didn't sync to the web. | Pull-to-refresh on the web side. If still missing, check the phone's connection — messages composed offline queue locally until they upload. |
| "Couldn't process this image." | Usually the image is too small, too dark, or the file format is unusual. Try a clearer shot, or convert to JPEG first. |
| App is sluggish. | Force-quit (swipe up, swipe Claude away) and reopen. If it persists after a fresh launch, restart the phone. If still bad, delete and reinstall — your threads are in the cloud, so nothing is lost. |
| Voice mode keeps cutting me off mid-sentence. | The voice-activity detection thinks you're done. Try speaking with less micro-pausing, or use Push-to-Talk mode if your version exposes it (the icon looks like a held microphone). |
| Photos from the Photos app come in blurry. | iOS sometimes downsizes shared images. Use the in-app camera button for full quality, or share the original from Photos with "Options → Mail Compression: Actual Size" if the share menu offers it. |
| I can't find a thread from last week. | Pull-to-search at the top of the thread list, or search on the web (where the search UX is denser). If still missing, check whether you signed in to a different account — usually the culprit. |
The mobile app is one of six doorways. The other five complement it — pick the one that fits where you're sitting right now.