Frequently asked questions

Owlka is an iPhone app that lets you drive Claude running on your own Mac, no terminal and no coding background needed. The Mac does the real work and the phone is the front seat. The two talk to each other through an end-to-end encrypted relay that we operate but cannot read. Your code, your terminal, and your project memory stay on your own machine. Want the longer version? See How it works.

You install the Owlka desktop app on your Mac and the Owlka app on your iPhone. The Mac app shows a one-time QR code. You scan it from the phone, which exchanges the encryption keys directly between the two devices. After that, your phone and your Mac both connect to the Owlka relay. Anything you type or say on the phone is sealed, sent phone to relay to Mac, and the Mac forwards it to the local claude command-line tool. Claude does the work on your Mac and the reply is sealed and streamed back the same way.

Yes. Owlka is a Mac desktop app and an iPhone app working together. The Mac runs Claude and holds your files. The iPhone is how you talk to it from anywhere. Neither half does anything useful on its own.

No. Every message is encrypted on your phone or your Mac before it leaves the device, and only your paired devices hold the keys. The relay looks at the recipient label on the outside of each sealed envelope and forwards it by key prefix. It does not open envelopes, it writes nothing to disk (it may hold a sealed packet in memory for a short window while a device reconnects), and it does not log their contents. We hold no master key and have no Owlka-side way to decrypt your conversation. The cryptographic detail is on the Security page.

We can see connection metadata: that a phone and a Mac talked, when, the per-pair public-key identifiers, the IP addresses, and the byte size of each sealed packet. We cannot see what you said, your files, your tool arguments, or your tool output. If hiding even that metadata matters to you, an internet-based assistant is the wrong shape. The full, honest list is in our Privacy Policy.

No. Owlka does not train any model on your prompts, your code, or the work Claude produces for you. Your use of Claude itself is governed by your own agreement with Anthropic, because your Mac talks to Anthropic directly under your own account.

When you dictate, your phone transcribes your voice locally using Apple’s on-device Speech framework. The audio never leaves your phone. Only the transcribed text is sealed and sent to your Mac, exactly like a typed message.

Your subscription. The Owlka desktop app runs the local claude command-line tool, which uses your own Claude Pro or Max login on your Mac. Anthropic API tokens are never read or used. The desktop app scrubs every API-key-flavoured environment variable before it starts the Claude tool, so your usage runs through your subscription, not a metered API bill.

No to both. Owlka does not resell Anthropic. You bring your own Claude Pro or Max subscription. Owlka never sees, copies, or stores your Anthropic login. It lives where the Claude tools put it on your machine, under your operating system’s user permissions, and your Mac talks to Anthropic directly. We never see your Claude traffic.

Yes. Claude, like every large language model, can sound confident and be wrong, invent facts, or write code that looks right but is not. It also has deep control of your Mac and can create, edit, and delete files. Treat replies as drafts, keep backups, and read changes before you approve them. The full picture is on the AI Use page.

Today, a Mac desktop app and an iPhone app. The Mac app is signed and notarised by Apple and runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. The iPhone app comes from the App Store. A Windows desktop build is in development and not yet available. We will announce it on the download page when the build is ready. For exact system requirements, see Support.

Owlka is free to download and use. No card on file, no charge, no usage meter on you. You do need your own Claude Pro or Max subscription from Anthropic, which Owlka does not resell. See the pricing section for the current details.

Owlka is built by Owlka Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales. Owlka Ltd is the data controller for the small amount of personal data Owlka processes. Details and your data rights are in the Privacy Policy.

Install the Owlka desktop app on your Mac and the Owlka app on your iPhone. In the desktop app, choose to pair a phone. A one-time QR code appears. In the iPhone app, choose to pair a new desktop and scan the code. The two devices exchange public keys directly, and the code expires straight after. You can pair as many phones with a Mac as you like, and one phone can pair with several Macs. Each pair is partitioned, so one person’s sessions are never visible to another.

Claude runs on your Mac, so your Mac needs to be awake and online for new work to happen. If the phone briefly drops off Wi-Fi, the relay queues sealed packets for a short window, so the phone can pick up where it left off when it reconnects. The relay does not store conversation history, so this is a short queue, not a backup. If your Mac is asleep or offline, new prompts wait until it is reachable again.

Unpairing a phone from the desktop app invalidates that phone’s key, and sealed packets from it are refused after that. To remove everything, open the iPhone app and go to Settings, Account, Delete account. The app wipes local data on your phone and tells the relay to forget your device records. Anything stored on your own Mac is yours to manage on your machine. Full steps are in the Privacy Policy.