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Find the symptom, not the cause. Every message quoted here is one the product actually shows. If nothing below matches, skip to Getting help — and send the exact text you are looking at.

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The Companion will not open, or keeps signing me out

The Companion checks its surroundings before it opens a window. A debugger, a proxy, a traffic-capture tool or a modified copy of the app all stop it.Close any network-analysis or debugging software and open the app again. If you did not install the app from a link an owner gave you, install it again from a fresh one.
Usually a stray space, a partial paste, or a key that was deleted in the dashboard.Go to Settings → Companion Keys, create a new key, and paste that. A real key is 64 letters and digits with no dashes, whatever the placeholder in the field suggests.
A key locks to the first Mac that signs in with it, permanently, and there is no way to unbind it.Delete that key in Settings → Companion Keys, create a new one, and sign in with it on this Mac. Your phones are not affected.
The Companion re-checks the key every five minutes. If the Mac loses internet for long enough, the check fails and you are signed out.Get the Mac back online and paste the key again. If it happens repeatedly, look at a VPN, a firewall or a corporate proxy on that network.
The version you have is too old to be used. This is not optional and there is no automatic updater.Ask an owner for a new download link in Settings → Downloads, install the new DMG over the old app, and sign in again with the same key.
Neither iPhones nor GrapheneOS phones can be managed until at least one platform’s tools are installed. The screen lists each missing tool with the command that installs it and a Copy button.Run them in Terminal, then press Re-check Dependencies. The full list is on Install the Companion.

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My phone does not appear in the Companion

Work through these in order. They are the Companion’s own five steps and they fix this almost every time.
  1. Unplug the iPhone, wait about ten seconds, and plug it back in.
  2. Use a known-good Apple cable, in a port on the Mac itself — no hubs.
  3. Unlock the iPhone and tap Trust if it asks.
  4. On iOS 17 and newer, make sure you approved the macOS password prompt.
  5. Press Build again.
The Companion scans every few seconds, so give it a moment rather than restarting the app.
The Mac cannot see the phone over USB. Same five steps as above. If one cable works and another does not, it was the cable.
This is usually the macOS password prompt being dismissed. Without it there is no tunnel to the phone and it looks unplugged.Press Build or Start again and type your Mac password when macOS asks. The message that goes with it is “Admin permission is required to start the iOS 17+ device tunnel. Please approve the password prompt and try again.”
Only GrapheneOS phones can be managed. A stock Android phone is listed so you can see it was noticed, and nothing more will happen with it. See Android phones.
The GrapheneOS phone has not authorised this Mac. Look at the phone, tick Always allow from this computer, and accept.

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My phone shows…

The phone has not trusted this Mac. Unlock it, tap Trust on the “Trust This Computer?” popup, and enter the passcode.There is nothing to press in the Companion afterwards — it keeps asking and lights the row up by itself.
The Companion is still identifying the phone and is retrying on its own.If it never clears, reseat the cable. The tooltip says the same: “Could not read this device’s info yet — retrying automatically. Reconnect the cable if this persists.”
The phone is seen but has no agent installed. Press Build.
The dashboard calls a phone offline when it has not heard from the Companion for about 90 seconds. Check that the Companion is open and signed in on the Mac, and that the Mac is awake and online.A sleeping Mac takes the whole fleet offline.
The phone is connected fine — it just has no paid slot behind it. Being plugged in and having a slot are separate things, and a phone can be Ready and still refuse to stream or run anything.Press the button on the row, or fix it in the dashboard under Settings → Billing. See Billing.
The phone is registered to a different organization. It has to be removed there before it can join yours. If you do not know where, contact support with the phone’s UDID.

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Build or Start fails

On the iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Developer Mode, switch it on. The phone restarts and asks you to confirm with Turn On. Then press Build.
Almost always the developer app not being trusted on the phone. This is a second, separate Trust step from the one at the cable.On the iPhone: Settings → General → VPN & Device Management, tap the developer app, choose Trust. Then press Start again.
Unlock the phone, keep it awake, and press Start. Nothing needs rebuilding. Fleet phones are normally left with auto-lock off.
Apple allows 100 devices per developer account per year, and every account you have connected is full. Connect another Apple Developer account in Settings → WDA Signing. See WebDriverAgent.
Server signing is selected but the setup is not finished. In Settings → WDA Signing, press Add account, fill in the App Store Connect details, then press Bootstrap on the row.
Apple has not finished registering the phone on your developer account. Nothing is broken. Press Build again in a few hours.
The Apple two-factor prompt gives you five minutes. Press Build again and have the code ready.
Too many phones are started on one Mac. Stop the ones you are not using, or move part of the fleet to a second Mac.
A network hiccup or a bad build on our side. Press Build again. If it repeats on the same phone, send the message to support.
Expected. The Companion checks each running phone every 30 seconds, restarts the agent after two failed checks, and rebuilds after three failed restarts. You will see it go Starting without touching it.

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Remote control will not open, or the screen is blank

Hover it. The tooltip says Remote Control unavailable and gives the reason — the phone is offline, the stream is not active, the agent is still being installed, or the phone is in an error state.In most cases the answer is to press Start on that phone in the Companion.
The agent is not running on that phone. Open the Companion and press Start.
The picture stalled. The viewer reconnects on its own, so wait a few seconds first.If it does not come back: wake the phone, then Stop and Start it in the Companion. A flaky network on either end causes this too.
The phone’s paid slot lapsed. Renew it under Settings → Billing. Slots do not renew themselves and there is no grace period.
You are signed in to a different organization from the one the phone belongs to. A user belongs to exactly one organization, so this means the phone is somewhere else — it has to be released there.
Either a relay outage on our side or a network that blocks the connection. Try another network first. If it persists everywhere, it is ours — write to support.
The Companion holding that phone dropped off between the video loading and your tap. Check the Companion is open, then reload the page.
The saved PIN did not work, and the Companion stopped after one attempt on purpose — repeated failures lock the phone out entirely, and a locked-out GrapheneOS phone cannot be recovered remotely.Unlock the phone by hand and correct the PIN in the device’s Containers tab. Profiles protected by a pattern or a password can never be unlocked remotely.

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A run failed with…

Automations, workflows and the Incubator all need Autogrowth MAX, a one-time lifetime license. It is offered by invitation, so if your organization has no price set the upgrade dialog reads Invite only. See Billing.
Creating Instagram accounts is a separate one-time purchase for the whole organization. Buy it under Settings → Billing.
The phone’s slot lapsed. Renew it, then queue the run again. A phone with no live slot is skipped silently by the scheduler, so its runs never start.
The account you picked is not linked to the phone you picked. Open the account, use Link iPhones, and try again. See Accounts.
The phone was not on the screen the automation expected. The usual causes are an app update that moved things, a popup in the way, the app being left on a different screen, or the phone being in another language.Put the app back on its home screen and run it again. Turning on AI recovery when you schedule helps with unexpected popups. If one automation fails this way repeatedly, send us the run’s log.
AI recovery was switched on for the run but your organization has no Claude API key. Add one under Settings → Integrations, or turn the toggle off.
The Mac crashed, slept, quit the Companion or lost its connection while the run was in progress.Keep the Mac awake and online — turning off sleep on the Mac is worth doing once. Then re-run.
The app is missing inside the container the run targeted. Install it in that container on the phone. See Containers.
The SMS provider never delivered a verification code. Check that the provider account has credit and that the country you picked has numbers available, then run it again.

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A run never happened

Pending means it is queued and waiting for the phone. It is not lost: it is retried every time the Companion checks in.Bring the phone and its Mac back online. Runs already queued behind another run on the same phone also wait — one phone runs one job at a time.
The phone never became available in time: “Execution expired — device never became available within 2h of the scheduled time”.Schedule it again with the phone online, or leave the fleet running so it is online when the time comes.
A posting step whose collection has nothing usable left in it is skipped, and the rest of the routine still runs. The workflow records a warning saying so — either the step has no collection at all, or the collection has run short.Collections drain: media that has been posted comes out of the pool, because reposting risks a ban. Add more media. See Collections.
Check, in this order: the Companion is open and signed in, the Mac is awake, the phones show Running, and the slots are live. Any one of those being false stops everything downstream.

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Uploads and content

This message is generic and is very often the storage quota rather than anything wrong with the file.Check Settings → Billing and look at the Storage tile before assuming it is the file. You get 20 GB per active phone slot.
The library is full. Delete media you no longer need, or add a phone slot — storage comes with slots and cannot be bought on its own.
The library takes images and videos, up to 100 MB per file. Compress or convert the file.
Reconnect Google Drive under Settings → Integrations. Imports are capped at 20 files at a time and land with no collection assigned, so move them into one afterwards.
Pushing media to a phone needs a live agent. Press Start on that phone.

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Accounts

Only Instagram and TikTok accounts are ever scraped. An X or Threads account will stay on Warming forever and never show follower numbers. That is how it works today, not a fault.An Instagram or TikTok account that has just been added is picked up within about half a minute, and everything else is refreshed once a day.
The last attempt to read its public profile failed — a rate limit, a wrong handle, or a platform hiccup. The next daily pass usually clears it.The underlying reason is not shown in the dashboard, so if it stays red for days, send us the handle.
The handle is already in your list. If you meant to add another phone to it, re-adding the same handle with a different phone links that phone instead of erroring.
The action needs the account to be linked to a phone. Open the account and use Link iPhones.
Engagement is not calculated today. Read followers and the 14-day trend instead.

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Refusals and money

The most common rejection in the product. Your role does not include the permission the action needs. Ask an organization owner to grant it — owners bypass every permission check, so they will not see the error themselves.
Everything is paid from your organization’s credit balance. Top it up under Settings → Billing; credits arrive when the payment confirms, not on redirect.
Every slot you own is already taken by a phone. Buy another slot, or remove a phone you no longer use.
MAX has not been offered to your organization, so there is no price to charge. Write to us.
The monthly container charge could not be taken from your credit balance. It is retried daily for seven days. After that, new containers are blocked while the ones you already have keep running. Add credits.

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Still stuck

The Companion’s Sprout panel keeps an Activity feed of everything that has gone wrong on that Mac, with a suggested fix where it has one. When it does not, it shows the raw message under “Something went wrong” — that raw text is exactly what support needs.

Getting help

Where to write, and what to send with it.

What AutoGrowth does not do

Check whether the thing you are chasing is a limit rather than a bug.