Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app — live sessions, approvals, and full project context from your phone

Codex has been doing serious work on developers’ machines for a while now, but until this week, if it needed a decision from you mid-task, your options were basically: be at your computer, or lose the thread. That changes with the May 14 update, which brings Codex into the ChatGPT mobile app on iOS and Android.

What’s actually happening here

When Codex is running on your Mac, laptop, or a remote devbox, it can now stream its live state directly to your phone. That means terminal output, diffs, screenshots, and test results all show up in the ChatGPT mobile app as they happen. From there, you can review what Codex has done, approve the next command, switch models, or kick off a new task entirely.

The phone is not doing any of the computation. Your files, credentials, permissions, and local environment all stay on the host machine. The phone is purely the review and control interface, receiving a real-time feed from wherever Codex is actually running. A secure relay layer keeps the connection going without exposing your machine directly to the internet.

Setup is straightforward: open the Codex desktop app on the machine you want to connect, enable remote access, scan the QR code from your phone, and confirm your account. Any multi-factor authentication, SSO, or passkey requirements go through that same flow.

Why this matters for day-to-day work

Real coding tasks take time. Codex might need to read a repository, edit multiple files, run tests, wait for output, and fix errors before it’s done. That process often hits a point where it needs human input to continue. Before this update, that meant the task would sit there waiting until you were back at your desk.

Now you can answer that question from wherever you are, review the diff, approve the next step, and let Codex keep going. The session continues on your machine. You just don’t need to be physically present for it.

OpenAI notes that more than 4 million developers now use Codex every week, and they’ve observed that small moments of guidance have an outsized impact on whether a long session stays productive or stalls. This update is a direct response to that pattern.

Available on all plans, not just Enterprise

One detail worth highlighting: Codex in the ChatGPT mobile app is rolling out in preview across all plans, including Free and Go, in all supported regions. The full capability set, reviewing threads, approving commands, starting new tasks, is not gated behind a paid tier. That’s a meaningful choice, and it puts this ahead of some comparable tools that restrict mobile access to higher-tier subscribers.

There are some plan-specific additions in this release, but they’re separate features rather than restrictions on the core mobile experience.

The Enterprise and business additions

For Business and Enterprise workspaces, this release comes with a couple of extras.

Programmatic access tokens let teams issue scoped credentials directly from ChatGPT workspace settings. These are designed for CI pipelines, release workflows, and enterprise automation where you need Codex to operate without a human logging in each time.

Remote SSH is now generally available. The Codex desktop app can detect SSH hosts from your SSH config and run projects inside those remote machines just as it would locally. Once connected, those environments become reachable across your authorised ChatGPT devices through the same relay infrastructure. You can start work on your desktop, steer it from your phone, and hand it back to your desktop later, all within the same session.

Remote control is off by default for Enterprise workspaces, and an admin needs to enable it in Workspace settings before anyone can use it.

HIPAA-compliant use for healthcare teams

Alongside the mobile release, OpenAI announced HIPAA-compliant use of Codex for local environments inside ChatGPT Enterprise. Healthcare engineering teams working with protected health information can now use Codex under HIPAA-eligible data processing agreements. It’s a specific addition for a specific audience, but it opens AI-assisted coding to a category of teams that couldn’t responsibly use it before.

A few practical things to know

If the host machine sleeps, loses network, or the Codex app closes, the mobile connection drops. For anything long-running, keeping the host awake matters. A Mac mini or a dedicated remote devbox is going to be more reliable than a laptop that might close or go to sleep mid-task.

Windows host support for incoming mobile connections is coming soon. You can control a Windows machine from a Mac or from your phone, but you can’t currently use Windows as the controlling device.

Cross-device continuity works in a useful way: if you start a thread from your phone on an always-on host, you can pick it up later from your laptop inside the Codex desktop app, and the same thread is there waiting.

The bigger picture

This release follows the Codex Chrome extension that launched a week earlier, which lets Codex use your signed-in browser to test web apps and interact with internal tools. Taken together, these updates point toward Codex operating more as a background agent: tasks run continuously, the user is not tied to a single machine or session, and control stays with the human through approvals rather than constant presence.

For developers who run long Codex sessions regularly, the practical shift is real. You’re no longer choosing between staying at your desk and losing momentum on a task.