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Three things have to be true at the same time for a phone to do anything: the phone is plugged in, the Companion is open on that Mac, and the agent on the phone is running. This page explains why, and what each part is responsible for.

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What each part does

Your phones do the actual work. They run Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads, and something on each phone taps the screen for you. On an iPhone that something is WebDriverAgent (WDA) — a small app the Companion installs. On a GrapheneOS phone it is called the Agent and needs no install. The Companion is a macOS app that runs on your Mac. It finds the phones over USB, installs and starts the agent, fetches the work that is due, drives the phone through it, and streams the screen back to you. It signs in with a license key rather than your password, and that key locks to the one Mac. The dashboard at dash.autogrowth.farm is where you decide things: which accounts exist, what should run and when, what media it posts, who on your team can see what. It never touches a phone directly. It writes down what should happen; the Companion is what makes it happen. AutoGrowth’s servers hold the schedule, your content library, your account statistics and your billing, and they relay two live channels between the dashboard and the Companion — the screen video going one way, your taps going the other.

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How a run travels

1

You schedule it

From the dashboard you pick an automation, a phone or an account, and a time. The run is saved as Pending.
2

The Companion picks it up

The Companion asks the server what is due for the phones it holds. When it takes a run, the run becomes Running and no other Mac can claim it.
3

The phone does it

The Companion drives the phone through the steps — opening the app, tapping, typing, uploading the media.
4

The result comes back

The run ends as Completed or Failed, with its log attached. You read both on the Logs page.
See Automations and Scheduling for what you can queue and how.

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What happens when the Companion is closed

Nothing runs. This is not a degraded mode — it is the whole design. When you quit the Companion, put the Mac to sleep, or lose the network:
A pending run is not lost the moment a phone goes offline, but it is not held forever either. Bring the Mac and the phone back within roughly two hours of the scheduled time and the run still happens.
The practical rule: leave the Mac awake, leave the Companion open, and leave the phones plugged in.

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Being plugged in is not the same as being paid for

Two separate things decide whether a phone can work.
  • Presence — is it plugged into a Mac with the Companion running? This is the status pill: Offline, Ready, Running, Error.
  • A slot — have you bought a phone slot for it, and is that slot still live?
They move independently. A phone with an expired slot can be plugged in, online and visibly Ready, and still refuse to stream or run anything: “This device’s slot has expired. Renew it to stream and run automations.” A phone with a perfectly good slot is useless if the cable is out. Both surfaces show both facts side by side, never one instead of the other. See Billing.

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The live screen

When you open remote control, the Companion starts capturing that phone’s screen and pushes it to whichever relay answers your browser fastest. Your taps travel back on a separate channel. Capture is on demand. With nobody watching, the Companion stops capturing after about 30 seconds and starts again the moment someone opens the viewer — so an idle fleet is not spending bandwidth on video nobody sees. See Remote control.

Install the Companion

The DMG, the license key, and the first launch.

What AutoGrowth does not do

The limits, stated plainly.