Using local Ollama models from your phone

On your home WiFi, a phone app that supports a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint can already talk to Ollama. It's on the same network. Switch to cellular data, or a coffee shop's WiFi, and that same app has nothing to connect to: your Ollama box is on a private network your phone is no longer part of.

The two usual answers

• A VPN back into your home network. Tailscale, WireGuard, or your router's built-in VPN all work, but each one means installing and maintaining a VPN client on the phone, and usually one on the server side too. That's infrastructure whose only job is getting your phone back onto the same network as your desktop.
• Pay for hosted inference instead. Skips the networking problem entirely by not using your own hardware at all, which defeats the point if the reason you're running Ollama is to keep your own models on your own machine.

Point your phone at the endpoint instead

Amallo already gives your Ollama install an OpenAI-compatible base URL reachable from any network, not just your home one. That's the same endpoint a laptop or a VPS uses, and a phone is just another client. Any mobile app with a setting for a custom OpenAI-compatible base URL and API key can use it the same way:

base_url = https://relay.41tunnels.com/v1
api_key  = 41t_9f2c…
model    = llama3.1:8b

Set it once, and it works identically on WiFi, cellular data, or roaming abroad. There's no VPN toggle to remember, because nothing about the connection depends on which network the phone happens to be on.

Mobile apps are the likeliest place to meet one that asks for a server URL and never asks for a key. If yours does, Amallo has a second URL with the key built into the path for exactly that case — see if a client has no API key field.

Setup on the desktop side is unchanged from any other client: install Amallo, point it at a running Ollama on 127.0.0.1:11434, and use the base URL and key it opens with. Relay is what makes that URL reachable from cellular data in the first place. It's the same outbound-only connection Amallo holds open for every other client, your phone included.