Give Cline an Android phone: a hosted Android MCP server for Cline.

Set it up

1. Get a key. Paste this into Cline. It installs the Phonebox CLI and signs you in from the terminal, so you never paste a key into the chat. Then put the key in your environment with export PHONEBOX_API_KEY=$(phonebox token).

Read https://phonebox.dev/setup.md and set me up with Phonebox from here: get me signed in and ready, then find out what I want to use phones for and help me with that.

2. Add the server. In the Cline panel, open MCP Servers, then Configure, then Configure MCP Servers, and add the entry. Set type to streamableHttp: without it, Cline assumes the older SSE transport. Cline expands ${env:PHONEBOX_API_KEY} from the environment VS Code was started with.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "phonebox": {
      "type": "streamableHttp",
      "url": "https://phonebox.dev/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ${env:PHONEBOX_API_KEY}" },
      "disabled": false
    }
  }
}

3. Check it. Open MCP Servers in the Cline panel. You should see phonebox with 13 tools. list_phones is a safe first call: it only reads.

What Cline can do with the phone

Cline reads the screen as text, so it taps “Sign in” by its label instead of guessing coordinates. Phonebox never retries a write to the phone on its own, so a slow response can't turn into a double order. A parked phone is free and keeps its apps, files and sign-ins. A running one costs $0.06 a minute, billed per second, and new accounts get $2 of credit with no card.

A first task

Build the debug APK and install it on my Phonebox phone.
Walk through the onboarding and settings screens I changed in this branch.
Read the screen before every action. Report anything that looks broken,
with the screen text you saw. Park the phone when you finish.

Other agents

The same server works in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf and GitHub Copilot. See the Android MCP server guide for every tool, and cloud phones for AI agents for the bigger picture.

Questions