LM Studio now lets you use your iPhone to talk to local models on your Mac
LM Studio now lets you use your iPhone to talk to local models on your Mac
Publish Date: 2026-06-04 13:21:00
Source Domain: 9to5mac.com
LM Studio’s Locally app is being updated today with Link, a feature that lets users talk to LLMs running on their Macs right from their iPhones. Here are the details.
LM Link lets you talk to local LLMs on your Mac
LM Studio is my go-to Mac app for running LLMs locally. Its model search feature is fantastic for finding the AI models best suited to my Mac’s hardware, helping me avoid models that might be too demanding for my 16GB M2 Pro MacBook Pro. And once the model is installed, LM Studio’s tools for adjusting its performance to my needs are by far the easiest and most complete I’ve used.
Today, LM Studio is updating its Mac app, and the Locally AI iOS app (which the company acquired earlier this year), with a new feature called LM Link. It establishes a secure connection between the iPhone and the Mac, allowing users to interact with the local models running on their Macs right from their iPhones.
Using LM Link requires you to create an LM Studio account and sign in to it on both devices. Once that’s done and you activate LM Link, it establishes an end-to-end encrypted connection that keeps data flowing privately and securely.
This means you can still rely on the privacy aspect of running and processing an LLM locally on your Mac, even though you’re sending data back and forth as you use it from your iPhone.
From LM Studio:
Your devices, linked together
End-to-end encrypted networking.
All data and communication between devices remain entirely private and secure. Your devices are never exposed to the public internet, because LM Link runs on top of custom Tailscale mesh VPNs.
On the Tailscale collaboration, LM Studio says that “LM Link is an entirely separate and self-contained use of Tailscale VPN primitives,” which means that LM Link will not interfere with an existing Tailscale VPN, if that’s the case.
LM Link works with any model users have installed on their Macs (including the…
