Free & open source for macOS
Your phone is
the trackpad.
Scan a QR code and your phone’s browser becomes a trackpad and keyboard for your Mac. Nothing to install on the phone, no account, and nothing leaves your network.
macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon & Intel
Three steps, then never again
Pairing is a one-time cost. After the first connection your phone is just there, the way a Bluetooth mouse is.
Start the server
Air Mouse lives in the menu bar. One click starts a local HTTPS server on your Mac and shows a QR code with a six-digit pairing PIN.
Scan with your phone
Point the camera at the code and the trackpad opens in Safari or Chrome. There is no app to install on the phone, and no App Store involved.
Enter the PIN once
Type the six digits and the phone is paired. It stores a token and reconnects on its own after that, including across restarts of the Mac app.
More than a cursor
It is a browser page, so an iPhone, an Android, or a tablet all work the same. Nothing is tied to an operating system except the Mac.
Trackpad
Tap, drag, two-finger scroll, right-click. The gestures you already use, at the size your thumb expects.
Air mouse
Switch to gyro and point the cursor by moving the phone itself. Useful from a sofa, where there is no surface to slide on.
Keyboard
The phone's own keyboard, including dictation — so voice typing on the Mac works even where macOS has none.
Shortcuts
Mission Control, Zoom controls, and copy and paste, as buttons rather than finger contortions.
Presenting? ← and → are on the phone too.
Where the native app goes next
Today Air Mouse only works on your own network, because the phone is just a browser pointed at your Mac. A native iOS app changes what is possible: it can hold a connection open, and it can choose between several ways of reaching your Mac.
Same network
TodayThe direct path, and the one that exists today. Phone and Mac talk over your LAN with nothing in between — typically under a millisecond, and the route the app will always prefer when it is available.
Peer-to-peer
PlannedWhen you are not on the same network, the plan is an encrypted tunnel negotiated directly between your two devices. Traffic still never touches a server we run; the rendezvous only introduces them to each other.
Relay
PlannedThe fallback for networks that refuse to hole-punch — some corporate and mobile ones do. Slower, and end-to-end encrypted, so a relay forwards bytes it cannot read.
Always the fastest route open
The intention is that you never pick one. The app measures latency on every route it can reach, uses whichever is quickest, and keeps measuring — so walking out of the house moves you from the LAN to a peer-to-peer tunnel, and walking back moves you home again, mid session, without the cursor stuttering. A pointer is unusable the moment it lags, so the switch has to happen underneath you or it is not worth having.
None of this exists yet. It is on the roadmap, and it is the reason the iOS app is worth building at all — the waitlist above is how you hear when it lands.
It never leaves the building
An app that can move your cursor and type for you deserves more scepticism than most. Here is exactly what it can and cannot reach.
Your network, end to end
The Mac serves the trackpad over HTTPS on your own LAN. There is no relay, no cloud, and no account — if your router is off, so is Air Mouse.
Paired, not open
A connection is ignored until it sends the right PIN or a token it was issued earlier. Wrong guesses are rate-limited across every connection at once.
Readable in an afternoon
The whole thing is open source: a Swift menu bar app and one HTML page. You do not have to trust the claims on this page — the input injection is a few hundred lines.
Questions worth asking
Something missing? Open an issue.
Know when it ships
Windows is not built yet, and the macOS build is not signed yet. One mail when whichever you pick is ready — nothing else, ever.
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