yado vs happy: claude code on your phone, two architectures
Happy is genuinely good: free, MIT-licensed, end-to-end encrypted, with iOS, Android, and web clients. You run happy instead of claude on your computer and the phone app mirrors the session. Yado is the app I build. Both put real Claude Code on your phone, on your own Claude subscription. The biggest difference: whose machine runs the session.
side by side
| Happy | Yado | |
|---|---|---|
| where the session runs | your computer, or a VPS you maintain | a cloud container Yado runs for you |
| needs a machine of yours on | yes | no — no laptop, no VPS, no server |
| price | free | free · Pro $9.99/mo (voice, parallel sessions) |
| open source | yes (MIT) | no |
| platforms | iOS, Android, web | iOS |
| uses your Claude subscription | yes | yes — Anthropic bills your tokens |
| who could read your session | nobody but you — end-to-end encrypted | in principle, me: the session runs on Yado’s infrastructure. Mitigations: ephemeral containers, encrypted at rest, deletable |
when Happy is the better pick
- Your laptop is on anyway — you just want to check on a session from the couch.
- You want open source you can read, self-host, and trust end to end.
- You’re on Android.
- You already maintain a VPS and don’t mind pointing Happy at it.
when Yado is the better pick
- The laptop is closed and staying closed — the session has to live somewhere that isn’t yours to keep awake.
- You want a chat UI built for the phone (with voice on Pro), not only a mirrored terminal.
- You want a live preview of the app you’re building, on the phone.
- You want parallel sessions running while you’re away (Pro).
honestly
If a machine of yours is reliably on, Happy costs nothing and is excellent — use it. Yado exists for the other case: I didn’t want to keep anything running, so I built the version where the cloud container is the machine. That’s the whole difference; pick by which case is actually yours.
sources: happy.engineering · github.com/slopus/happy