Codex Remote reached general availability on June 25, 2026, per the official changelog. The feature links the ChatGPT mobile app on iOS or Android to a Codex host running on a Mac or Windows machine, so a task you’d normally kick off at your desk can be started, checked, and steered from your phone.
How does Codex Remote pairing work?
You pair by QR code. The changelog describes authenticated QR pairing between the ChatGPT mobile app on iOS or Android and a Mac or Windows host running Codex — scan from the phone, and the two devices are linked. Connections made from June 8 onward stay paired, so if you set up a link during the pre-GA window, it carries over to the GA release without re-pairing.
That June 8 cutoff is the one migration detail worth knowing: anything paired earlier needs a fresh QR handshake.
What did the July 6 iOS update add?
Eleven days after GA, ChatGPT for iOS version 1.2026.181 (released July 6) extended what the phone side can actually do, again per the changelog: creating Codex tasks, searching them, and managing them directly from the app, plus SSH shortcuts. Before this update the mobile app was mostly a viewport onto the paired host; with task creation and search on the phone, the remote loop is closed — start work from the train, review it when you’re back at the machine.
The same June 25 changelog batch that took Codex Remote to GA also shipped a DigitalOcean droplet plugin.
Why does mobile matter for Codex?
Mobile rounds out the surface map. Codex now spans the CLI, IDE extensions, the desktop app, cloud, GitHub, mobile, and the SDK — and mobile went GA just two weeks before the desktop app merged into ChatGPT on July 9. For a tool whose sessions increasingly run long in the background, a sanctioned way to check on an agent from your pocket is the difference between kicking off a big task at 5 p.m. and waiting until morning to look at it.
One housekeeping note if you go looking for the primary source: the changelog now lives at learn.chatgpt.com — the old developers.openai.com/codex URLs redirect there permanently, which we covered separately. Release-by-release history is on our releases reference.