Drive a phone farm from one prompt

Connect the phones to the Mac through the powered hub. On each Android phone, turn on USB debugging and tap Allow USB debugging when the host asks; that is all the configuration an Android phone needs. On each iPhone, enable Developer Mode and Trust the host when prompted — the two one-time taps Apple requires. Everything else on the iOS side is provisioned by the daemon.

One line installs the farm host. Sign in once in the browser so the host can pair — the daemon refuses to start unsigned, so a farm never runs without an owner by accident — then start it with autostart so it relaunches at login and reboot. The status command shows the running build, how many phones are online, and whether the host is paired.

The host pairs itself as a Busymate device with a long-lived credential kept on disk, so it never needs your session again. Each phone becomes a child device under it with a stable identity that survives a USB reconnect, inheriting your ownership.

Open the Phone Farm view in the dashboard. Its sidebar has a Daemon entry — the farm-level pane with a control panel per machine and a live log tail streamed up from the host — and one entry per farm machine, opening that Mac's Android and iOS phones. Each phone shows model, OS version, battery and state, and a live mirror: the screen is streamed as video and hardware-decoded in your browser, and your taps, swipes and keystrokes round-trip to the physical device. Recovery after a daemon restart is heartbeat-driven, so there is nothing to refresh.

Each phone needs a few components kept current — the on-device control runner, the certificate trust, the Busymate DevTools app for capture, and so on. Rather than walking the rack, the host card's Onboard all phones action runs the fleet walk for you, with per-phone isolation so one failing install can never abort the sweep. The dashboard renders a live grid of phones by components; a cell only turns green once the daemon confirms the installed version, an already-current component is a muted skip, and anything that needs a human — an Apple ID prompt, a paid app — is flagged rather than faked.

Two doors lead to the same tools. BusyBro is built into the dashboard and the standalone BusyBro app, already signed in as you. Claude Code — or any MCP client — connects to the same server with one command and a browser sign-in, covered in the previous guide. Either way the assistant acts as you: every farm tool is scoped to your own farm devices, gated on the host's remote-control opt-in, and checked against your role's capabilities.

Say what you want done across the fleet, in plain language. The assistant lists the online phones, screenshots each, opens the app, finds and taps the elements it needs by reading the screen's UI hierarchy, types the sign-in, and reports back per phone. Variables you set in the farm console — a test account, a coupon code — are available to automations by name, so the prompt never has to contain a password.

Anything that changes a phone shows you a confirm card first — with the full payload of what is about to run — and waits. A screenshot or a UI dump needs no confirmation; a tap, an install from the public store, or an automation run does. Raw shell, raw ADB, arbitrary input, proxy and airplane toggles and reboots are admin-only power actions the free-text assistant cannot reach at all; they stay in the dashboard and the MCP tools behind an explicit confirm.

Automations are plain JavaScript files on the host with a device API — install, launch, find-and-tap, type, screenshot — and a scheduler that runs them on an interval. Ask the assistant to schedule one and it becomes an overnight job with per-device results. Traffic from farm phones routes through the shared proxy into the same feed as your own phone, so a run's network activity is inspectable, mockable and exportable like any other capture; Android farm phones run at the rooted tier where the certificate sits in the system store, which decrypts everything short of an app that pins.

Fleet health is a tool too: ask which phones need attention, and the assistant reads the same heartbeat the dashboard shows and can trigger the self-heal sweep — again behind a confirm.