Give Gemini CLI an Android phone: a hosted Android MCP server in one command.

Set it up

1. Get a key. Paste this into Gemini CLI. 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. Use the command, or add the server to ~/.gemini/settings.json yourself. Use httpUrl, because Gemini CLI treats url as SSE. Settings can read ${PHONEBOX_API_KEY} from the environment, while the command writes the expanded key into the file.

gemini mcp add --transport http --scope user \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $PHONEBOX_API_KEY" \
  phonebox https://phonebox.dev/mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "phonebox": {
      "httpUrl": "https://phonebox.dev/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ${PHONEBOX_API_KEY}" }
    }
  }
}

3. Check it. Run /mcp in a session, or gemini mcp list in your shell. You should see phonebox with 13 tools. list_phones is a safe first call: it only reads.

What Gemini CLI can do with the phone

Gemini CLI 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, Windsurf, Cline and GitHub Copilot. See the Android MCP server guide for every tool, and cloud phones for AI agents for the bigger picture.

Questions