Element Labs, the developer of the local AI app LM Studio, announced on June 4, 2026 (local time) that its device-linking feature "LM Link" now supports iPhone and iPad. You can connect to your home or office PC from your smartphone while on the go and use the local AI models running there as they are. The iOS app "Locally" serves as the client, and all communication between devices is end-to-end encrypted.
Call Up "the AI Running on Your Home PC" from Anywhere
LM Studio is an app that lets you search for, download, and run open models such as Gemma and Qwen on your own machine. Thanks to its quick support for new models and the fact that everything can be done through a GUI, it has become one of the standard tools in the local AI community.
LM Link, which has now started rolling out, is a feature for securely connecting your own devices and using local models remotely. Until now, a weak point of local AI was that high-performance models could only run on stationary, powerful machines, becoming unavailable the moment you left home. With LM Link's iPhone and iPad support, you can keep models running on your home PC and chat with them from the smartphone in your hand. It is effectively like carrying around large models that a phone alone could never fit in memory, so this is a long-awaited update for local AI users.
Communication Is Protected by a Tailscale-Based Mesh VPN
Remote access naturally raises security concerns, but LM Link is built on top of custom Tailscale mesh VPNs, so your devices are never exposed to the public internet. All data and communication between devices is end-to-end encrypted, and chat histories are saved only locally on each device.
The key point is that it enables use on the go while preserving the inherent privacy advantage of local AI: your conversations are never sent to external servers. For use cases where you do not want to hand your conversations to cloud AI, this design really pays off.
The iPhone App "Locally" Becomes the Official Mobile App
The client on the iPhone and iPad side is "Locally". Locally was originally known as an app that could run local AI models directly on the iPhone, but it was acquired by Element Labs, the developer of LM Studio, in April 2026. Together with this LM Link support, Locally is now positioned as LM Studio's official mobile app, meaning the integration bore fruit roughly two months after the acquisition.
Getting started is simple as well.
- Install LM Studio on your PC
- Enable LM Link in LM Studio and keep it running
- Install the Locally app on your iPhone or iPad
- Follow the in-app instructions to add your iPhone to your Link
That is all it takes to use the models running in LM Studio on your PC from your smartphone. The development team says improvements will continue to ship in future updates, so the push into mobile seems to be just getting started.
Summary
With the arrival of LM Link, local AI has taken a step forward from "AI you can only use at home" to "AI you can use anywhere, with your home PC as the mothership". Being able to call up large models from your iPhone while keeping privacy intact over a Tailscale-based encrypted connection is a major draw. If you already use LM Studio, the setup effort is small, so the Locally app is well worth a try for anyone who is often away from their desk.
