2026-08-27 · Guide

Grok Bot on iPhone: What the App Does and What Still Needs Desktop

Correction, 4 September 2026. When this page was written the Grok Bot docs listed no Linux desktop app and no Android app, and described the iPhone app as pause and resume only. The docs now list a Linux desktop app (x64 and Arm64, as a .deb, an .rpm or an AppImage) and an Android companion app for Android 9 or later, and the phone app can create bots, message them, approve steps, take over the computer and pause routines. On 4 September iPad was still not supported. The current platform list is on Grok Bot supported platforms and the Android app has its own page. As of 23 September 2026 the iOS app also runs on iPad (iPadOS 18 or later), and the phone can show run history and delete a routine.

A looping standup on the 07:40 is how you meet the real Grok Bot iPhone app. Pause works. Resume works. Run history and deleting work. Editing, testing, and teach-by-demonstration do not. The phone is a companion sitting next to a workstation you still have to own.

This page is that split, and only that split. It is not a remake of the supported platforms list. That article names every client, including the machines this product does not ship. Here the question is smaller: you already have an iPhone, you already have (or can reach) a desktop, and you need to know what the pocket client is for before the next commute.

Documented scope, from the mobile page: iPhone on iOS 18 or later, and the same iOS app on iPad with iPadOS 18 or later. On that phone you can pause and resume a routine. Editing and testing a routine still need the desktop app; the phone can now show run history and delete a routine. Teach by demonstration is unavailable on iPhone (skills, routines and automations). Design around those sentences. Do not invent a pocket studio on top of them.

Treat Grok Bot iPhone as a companion, not a workstation

A workstation is where you create the job, change the job, prove the job, read what the job did, and retire the job. A companion is where you interrupt a job that is already running. Grok Bot iPhone is the second thing. It is not a slow copy of the first.

That sounds like a downgrade until you remember where the work actually happens. The bot is not compiling on the silicon in your pocket. It runs on the persistent cloud computer assigned to your account, a managed Linux virtual machine, as a non-root user. Your phone is a remote control for a machine that keeps going after you lock the screen. The routine control on that phone is pause, resume, and delete. Everything that looks like authorship stays on a desktop: a Mac, a Windows PC, or Linux.

People hear "there is an iPhone app" and picture the whole product in a pocket. The install is real. The routine feature set is short. Ask, of every bot you leave running, whether a freeze from a seat-back tray is enough. If not, the bot is not commute-safe. The phone cannot grow an edit button because you need one.

Confirm iOS 18 before you bother installing

The supported mobile client is iPhone running iOS 18 or later (FAQ). Older iOS is not a "limited mode". It is outside the list. Check Settings -> General -> About before you spend the download, and again after a major OS night if the app vanishes from the home screen and you assume a product outage.

iOS 18 is the floor, not a feature pack. Crossing it does not unlock editing. It unlocks the companion. The same iOS app runs on iPad with iPadOS 18 or later, and Android 9 or later has its own app. If the device in your pocket is none of those, the companion described here is not that device. The platforms page is the matrix.

You still need an eligible plan or the one-time trial. The phone app does not bypass that door. Every paid Cursor plan includes Grok Bot, from Cursor Pro at $20; Cursor Hobby, the free plan, does not, and an individual SuperGrok, SuperGrok Plus, SuperGrok Heavy or X Premium+ subscription can be linked instead. Unpack the false starts in the Cursor account explainer.

Sort every routine action into pocket or desk

Write the split down once. Do not keep it as a feeling. The feeling says "I have the app, I can handle it". The table says otherwise.

Pause and resume are the documented mobile pair. Editing and testing a routine still need the desktop app; the phone can now show run history and delete a routine (mobile). Teach by demonstration is unavailable on iPhone (skills, routines and automations).

Pause is an interrupt. Resume is a bet that the thing you froze is still the thing you want. If you paused because the charter is wrong, resume restarts the misfire. Hold resume until a desk, unless you froze a healthy job by accident and you can see that in a channel outside Grok Bot, such as your own DM thread. The desk column is the authoring loop: create, change, prove. Install the companion. Do not pretend it is a laptop.

Ride a misfiring standup from the 07:40 to a desk

Here is the Tuesday that this page is for.

You run Standup Scribe at 07:15 on weekdays. It reads your calendar and a private Slack channel, drafts a standup, and posts only to your own direct messages. A noisy DM to yourself is recoverable. A noisy post to the team channel is not.

07:42, standing on the 7. Your phone buzzes. The same line, "blocked on legal review", lands in your DMs again. Then again. A calendar phrase is being treated as a fresh blocker, or a retry is firing because the last post did not look like success.

You open Grok Bot iPhone. You can pause. You can read run history, so you can see whether this is the third run or the twelfth. You cannot edit the trigger. You cannot test a one-shot that reads the calendar once and stops. You could delete the routine, but you would lose the thing you need to fix. You cannot record a cleaner path. You pause.

07:43 to 08:40 is the companion's whole job: the loop stops producing. Run history on the phone tells you how many runs fired. You cannot patch the charter sentence that says "if you already posted today, stop".

08:55 at a Mac, the workstation exists. Read the run records, see the retry, change the charter to one pass, test once, resume. That is the fix. The train was only a freeze.

If this bot had posted to a shared channel, pause at 07:42 would not unsend 07:38. An approval governs a proposed action and does not reverse work already completed (approvals, security and privacy). Individual accounts and self-serve Teams still have no audit view of Bot actions; Enterprise has audit logs and Action Recording (teams and enterprises). The Tuesday works because the boundary was a DM to yourself. Change that boundary and the same ride is a cleanup in public.

Freeze the run, then wait to diagnose until you sit down

The instinct after a pause is to keep poking: diagnose, tweak, test, so you can ride the rest of the way in peace. Grok Bot iPhone will not let you tweak or test. Diagnosis can start from Run history on the phone, but a theory you invent on the train is untested. Resume would turn it into another loop. Write the theory in Notes. Do not act on it in the Grok app.

Silence after a pause is not a fix. The charter is still the charter that looped. Leave it down until a desk can fix it, unless you froze a healthy job by accident. Do not reach for the delete control. The phone can delete a routine, but a paused routine you can inspect later is better than a missing one you cannot explain.

Use the rest of the ride for operations the companion cannot steal: tell anyone who already received a duplicate, and decide whether today's standup still needs a human paste.

Write charters that survive a pause between stations

If pause is the only remote lever, the charter has to assume a freeze in the middle of a run. A bot that is safe to interrupt is a bot you can leave running while you travel. A bot that leaves the world half-labelled, half-posted, or half-deleted is a bot you should not schedule across a commute.

Work in complete steps. The correct state after a pause is the state before the current step started, not a pile of partial writes. One pass per run. No self-retry because the last post "might not have landed". No follow-up task invented because this run suggested one. End with a report you can read without opening run history: sources read, output produced or skipped, anything that looked like a loop.

Paste this and change the names. It is the Tuesday standup, written so a train pause is boring.

// COMMUTE-SAFE STANDUP
You draft my weekday standup and post it only to my own Slack DM.
Never a shared channel, never email, never a calendar invite, never a
thread reply in a public channel.

// ONE PASS
One draft per weekday. If you already posted a standup to my DM today,
stop. Do not retry because a calendar item changed after 07:15. Do not
schedule a follow-up run from inside this run.

// INTERRUPTIBLE STEPS
Work in complete steps. A pause must leave the world as it was before
the current step, not half-posted. If you cannot finish a step, skip it
and say so in the report.

// BOUNDARY
Never send, never post to a shared surface, never delete mail, never
spend, never cancel. If finishing would require any of those, stop.
Failing the task is the correct outcome.

// REPORT I CAN READ WITHOUT HISTORY
End every run with: sources you read, whether you posted to my DM or
skipped, and anything that looked like a loop or a retry. Assume I am
on a train and cannot edit or test anything until I reach a desk.

The boundary block is the commute. Inbox Triage is built the same way: it never sends, so a freeze cannot unsay a customer email that was never sent. Mail Cleanup Assistant is the opposite shape: deleting mail is not interrupt-safe, so it does not belong on a 07:15 while you are between stations. Match the bot to the lever you will actually have.

Keep demonstration teaching off the phone forever

Teach by demonstration records up to ten minutes of visible browser interaction, captures no microphone audio, produces a draft skill, covers browser workflows only, and is unavailable on iPhone. That last clause is not a tutorial gap. It is the product.

Do not plan to record a Gmail filing path on the train. The recorder lives in the desktop app and captures a browser workflow. Native apps, Finder, terminals, and desktop mail clients are out of scope even at a desk. The output is a draft you edit, not a finished worker you schedule.

Teaching is how people think they will skip charter writing. They will not skip it from a pocket. If your only supported device is the iPhone, you cannot teach, edit, or test. You can pause, resume, read the history of, and delete routines that already exist because someone authored them at a desk. No desk, no authoring. A demonstration that included one Send is how you teach Send. Review that draft at the desk. The phone cannot open it.

Read the twenty run records before they rotate

The app keeps 20 most recent run records per routine. Those records live with the product, not in a file on your phone. Grok Bot iPhone shows them as Run history on the Bot profile, and so does the desktop client.

Twenty is a short window if a routine is looping. A misfire that posts every few minutes can rotate the evidence off the list before you sit down. Pause early, not to be dramatic, but to stop the window from filling with the same broken run. The Tuesday 07:42 pause is how you keep 07:15 and 07:38 readable at 08:55. Wait until 08:40 to pause and you may only see the last twenty copies of the same mistake.

Individual accounts and self-serve Teams still have no audit view of Bot actions; Enterprise has audit logs and Action Recording. Run history, on the phone or a desktop, is the closest record you have. External traces (your DM thread, a draft folder, a spreadsheet) are what you have beyond those twenty records. Design bots so those traces exist. A bot that only browsed and wrote nothing you can see from another app is a bot you cannot reconstruct from a seat.

A routine assigns a workflow to one bot. Max 50 routines per bot. Nothing is team-level. Creating and editing routines is not available from iPhone.

Delete nothing from the phone before you have seen the wreckage

You can now delete a routine or a bot from Grok Bot iPhone. The correct instinct is still to leave it paused until you have read what it did.

Deleting a bot deletes its routines. It does not wipe the shared computer. Cookies, sessions, files, and CLI credentials stay. Screens are not security boundaries. Deleting from a phone still leaves those logins behind, and a seat is a poor place to hunt for them. Pause is the pocket move. Teardown is desk work. The shared-computer facts sit in the security write-up.

Do not sign out of the Grok app thinking that signs the bot out of Gmail. Your phone session is not the cloud computer's browser. Sit down, read, then tear down on purpose.

Gate commuting jobs by whether pause is enough

The companion does not change what a bot is allowed to do. It changes what you can do about a bot that is already doing it. Sort the roster by that gap before you leave the house.

The test is not usefulness. It is whether a freeze twenty minutes late leaves an acceptable world. Draft-only bots pass. Shared files you have not sent pass. Customer mail, ledgers, and shared channels fail. The missing feature is undo, which the product does not claim.

Least privilege is the same rule from the other side. Approvals are a gate in front of the next step, not a rewind (approval rules). If the irreversible step already happened, the phone has nothing left to offer.

Prove pause on a dummy run before the first commute

Do not discover the companion on a live standup. Prove it on a throwaway routine, at a desk, with both clients open.

Create a slow dummy on the desktop that writes a line to a private doc every so often. Start it. Pause from Grok Bot iPhone. Watch the desktop. Confirm the next line does not appear. Resume, confirm it continues, pause again. Then confirm you can open run history and delete from the phone, but cannot edit or test. People skip that last part and assume the rest of the app is behind a menu. It is not.

If pause from the phone does not stop the dummy, you do not have a companion. Tighten every boundary as if you had no remote control, then file the failure rather than taking the live fleet on the 7. Run the drill once per phone, and again after a major OS update.

Answer the claim that pause is the whole product

The strongest objection to this page is not "the app should do more". It is "the app already does the only thing that matters". You live on your phone. You can freeze damage. You will edit tonight. Why is a companion not enough?

For a fleet that is already draft-only, already posting to yourself, already forbidden to send, spend, or delete, the objection is partly right. The commute does not need a workstation if the worst case is a duplicate DM and you will sit down in an hour. Pause is the button that matters on that ride. Installing Grok Bot iPhone is then a correct, small decision.

Three facts stop that from being the whole product.

The phone shows the twenty run records, but it cannot change the charter they point at. Reading them on a seat is how people resume too early, or how they walk into a desk already narrating the wrong cause.

You cannot test a fix, so "I will edit tonight" is a hope about evening time, not a plan you can start at 07:43. If the evening slips, the routine stays paused through the next morning or you resume the broken charter. The companion cannot break that bind.

You cannot teach or edit. The first week of Grok Bot is authoring. Authoring is desk work. A person whose only supported device is the iPhone does not have a slower Grok Bot. They have pause and resume for routines they have no way to create. That is not a companion. That is a remote for a machine you never set up.

So grant the objection its case: travel-time operations on a pause-safe fleet. Then keep the workstation. The companion is named after the desk it sits beside.

Carry a desk-return list that the phone cannot execute

The ride home is when you will try to finish the job in Grok Bot iPhone and bounce off the same walls. Write the desk list in Notes while it is fresh, because the companion will not hold a diagnosis for you.

What you paused, and at what clock time. What you already saw in another app (DM copies, draft emails, spreadsheet rows). What you must not resume until you have read history. What you will test once at the desk before the next scheduled run. Who you already told, if a duplicate landed where a human would care.

That list is the handoff from companion to workstation. Skip it and 08:55 becomes a hunt through Slack while the paused bot sits there. If a meeting eats the desk window, the routine stays paused. Do not resume from the phone because the buzzing stopped. The buzzing stopped because you paused. Scheduling is how you keep the next run from firing during that meeting. Change the cadence at a desk.

Leave irreversible work off any routine that runs while you travel

The companion's existence is a design constraint on the roster, not a reason to grow the roster. If you cannot undo it from a train, do not let it run while you are on a train.

Sends, shared-channel posts, mail deletes, refunds, calendar cancels, anything that spends. Those wait for a human at a desk, or they wait for a bot that is not scheduled across the commute. Drafts, private docs, research sheets, and DMs to yourself can run, because a late pause leaves you with extra drafts rather than a public mess.

This is the same boundary conversation as the safety checklist, arrived at from a device limit rather than from a consent screen. Grok Bot iPhone does not make a dangerous bot safer. It makes a safe bot interruptible.

If you always have the laptop, install the companion anyway and prove pause once. The first week you forget the laptop is the week it has to be real. If you want a pocket studio, that product is not this product, as of the docs rechecked 2026-09-23. Do not wait for the companion to become a workstation on the ride you are taking tomorrow.

Keep reading: What Grok Bot actually is, Grok Bot supported platforms, Grok Bot safety checklist.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Grok Bot work on iPhone?

Yes, on iPhone running iOS 18 or later, as a companion rather than a workstation. You can pause and resume a routine, read its run history, and delete it. You cannot edit or test a routine from the phone; those need the desktop app. Teach by demonstration is unavailable on iPhone, and the same iOS app runs on iPad with iPadOS 18 or later. The bot's work still runs on the account's cloud computer while you are away. For routines, the phone interrupts, restarts, reads, or deletes one that already exists. Confirm iOS 18 and an eligible plan before you treat the install as access to the full product.

Can I edit or delete a Grok Bot from my iPhone?

You can delete, but not edit a routine. Editing and testing a routine still need the desktop app client. Grok Bot iPhone exposes pause, resume, run history, and delete. If a routine is misfiring, pause it, read its run history, and wait until you sit down to change the charter or test a fix. Deleting a bot also deletes its routines, and does not wipe shared-computer files or sessions, so teardown belongs on a screen that can show you what you are removing. A paused routine you can inspect later is safer than a missing one you cannot explain.

Can I teach Grok Bot by demonstration on iPhone?

No. Teach by demonstration is unavailable on iPhone. You record in the desktop app, on a browser workflow, for at most ten minutes, with no microphone audio. The result is a draft skill, not a finished worker, and it covers browser workflows only. The iPhone app cannot start that recording, cannot edit the draft, and cannot test it. If your only supported device is a phone, this teaching path is closed. Pause and resume remain useful later, once a desk recording exists and a routine is already running.

A routine is misfiring on my commute. What can I actually do?

Pause it in Grok Bot iPhone and read its run history, then stop. Do not resume until a desk can fix the charter, and do not hunt for edit controls that are not there. Pause does not undo work already completed, so anything already sent, posted, or deleted stays that way. Write down what you saw in other apps, tell anyone who already received a duplicate, and fix the charter at a desktop. Prove pause on a dummy routine before the next live commute so the freeze is a reflex, not a discovery.