I Built a TV Rewatch Tracker Entirely From My Phone

I like watching TV shows. New ones as they come out, and old favorites I go back to. I used to keep track of it all in my notes app. What I'd seen, what season I was on, what was worth a rewatch. It worked, but barely. So I built Couchmode, a real tracker for it.

The app itself isn't the interesting part. I built the whole thing from my phone. No laptop, no IDE, no dev environment. Just Claude Code mobile.

The loop was simple. Prompt for a feature, check the PR preview on Vercel, prompt again. No local build, no simulator. Merge to release, and it deploys on Vercel automatically.

Worth being clear about what "phone-only" actually meant. Claude Code and ChatGPT both now have remote control features that let you drive a laptop dev environment from the mobile app. That's not what I mean here. The constraint I set was no laptop at all, not even as a remote target. You could argue the cloud environments Claude spins up on its own are the same idea, and fair enough. But the difference for me was that it didn't require me to own or carry a second piece of hardware. My phone was the whole setup.

Not everything stayed easy. Setting up Google auth and some of the Supabase config needed dashboards that assume a full desktop screen. I made it work by switching to the request desktop view feature in Safari and Chrome mobile.

I wrote my first iPhone apps in Objective-C, on early Xcode. Testing on a real device meant provisioning profiles and a cable. There was ceremony before you got to see your code running. This time, testing a change was opening a link.

It's not my preferred way to build. I like having a real environment. But I'm not tied to a laptop to make progress. If I think of a feature, I can build it right then.

Try Couchmode yourself. I still check it before starting a rewatch, just to remember where I left off, and to figure out what to watch next.

Source: github.com/adamweeks/CouchMode. Questions or want to talk shop: find me on LinkedIn.