Your Home GPU in Your Pocket: Run LM Studio Models From Your Phone With LM Link

Written by Jakub Rusinowski · Last updated July 10, 2026

LM Studio's new LM Link and the Locally iPhone app let you run your biggest local models — even 70B+ — from your phone. The model stays on your desktop; only the chat travels, end-to-end encrypted. Here's how it works and why it matters.

• Locally vs. LM Link: Two Things, One Workflow
• How It Actually Works (The Part That Matters for Privacy)
• Setting It Up: Three Steps
• What About Android?
• The Use Cases: Why You'd Actually Want This
• What It Is *Not*
• The Bigger Picture

There are two completely different ways to "run AI on your phone," and people constantly confuse them. The first is on-device inference: a small 1B–4B model running directly on your phone's chip, fully offline. We covered that in Can You Run a Local LLM on Your Phone? — it's great for airplane mode, but you're capped at tiny models. The second is what LM Studio shipped in June 2026, and it changes the math entirely. With LM Link and the Locally iPhone app, your phone becomes a remote control for the powerful machine you already own. The model runs on your desktop's GPU. Your phone just sends t…

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