Obsidian has been my notes app for years and all of it has been from my desk, so all of what I do in the app happens at my PC and stays there. The phone side of all this has always been more of an afterthought and the only first-party way to even get my vault onto my phone is a paid subscription I've stubbornly avoided for years.

So I'd resigned myself to that being the trade-off. Real vault work was a desktop activity, and the phone could sit it out. Recently though, I stumbled into a workaround that has nothing to do with the Obsidian app itself - or its paid sync option. That workaround is Claude, and it's ended up doing more for the way I use my vault than any equivalent Obsidian has ever shipped.

Obsidian Sync is the only paywall in an otherwise free app

And mobile is exactly where it stings

I've been using Obsidian for years without ever creating an account or paying a cent, and the entire vault lives on my drive as plain markdown files I can do whatever I want with. That whole free arrangement only gets you so far once you want to get your vault on your phone. Obsidian Sync is the only first-party way to get it onto a second device, and it runs $4 a month (billed annually) or $5 month-to-month, with a Sync Plus tier at $8 a month for more storage and longer version history. Using it also means creating an Obsidian account, so probably one of the last apps left on the planet that doesn't require you to sign up, now would.

In fairness, Sync genuinely works well for what it is. Each device keeps its own local copy of the vault and Sync just pushes changes between those copies with end-to-end encryption and proper conflict resolution, which the free workarounds can't really compete with. iCloud and Dropbox don't understand Obsidian's file structure so you tend to end up with sync conflicts.

But Sync only solves the where-the-files-are problem. The vault being on my phone doesn't change what I can actually do with it from there, so I'd still be stuck doing whatever I could manage in mobile Obsidian, which isn't as optimized as the desktop version.

Setting up Dispatch in Claude

So I can talk to my vault from my phone

Dispatch is a feature inside Claude Cowork, which is Anthropic's desktop automation tool, and it launched in March 2026 as a research preview. Cowork itself was Mac-only at first with Windows support landing in early April, and the whole thing is limited to the Pro and Max plans unfortunately. I know I just talked about not wanting to pay for Obsidian so it might seem contradictory to then pay for Claude, but this Obsidian setup is not the reason for my Pro plan, it's just a nice addition.

Regarding Dispatch, the pitch is pretty simple. You pair the Claude mobile app with the desktop app, and from that point your phone basically becomes a remote for whatever Claude session is running on your PC. There's one persistent thread between the two devices so what I type on my phone is what Claude works on at my desktop, and the reply comes back on both. The trade-off is that your PC has to stay awake with the Claude app open the whole time, although there is a Keep Awake toggle inside Dispatch.

Cowork has a Dispatch entry in its sidebar on desktop, you click Get Started, pair the phone via QR code, and that's the whole flow. Dispatch then shows up in the mobile app's sidebar as its own thread. Since Dispatch inherits whatever permissions Cowork already has, it didn't need any Obsidian-specific setup from me.

What Dispatch was actually designed for is more general productivity stuff like pulling a daily briefing from your Slack and email, or kicking off long-running tasks at your PC while you're away from your desk. The fact that it ends up being great for Obsidian is kind of incidental, because the vault is just a folder of markdown files and Claude doesn't really care which app I'd normally use to open them.

It's mostly file management

But it's still vault work I'd never have done from my phone otherwise

Most of what I do with Dispatch is file management, like renaming notes and moving files between folders. It's the kind of vault hygiene I'd never realistically do on mobile Obsidian because trying to wrangle files on a phone screen is just miserable. With Dispatch I just say something like "rename the note I created this morning to whatever" or "move that draft into the Articles folder", and it's handled on my PC without me having to actually open Obsidian.

Creating text files is probably the biggest day-to-day win for me. I type a note in Dispatch, tell it which folder to drop it into, and it lands in the vault as plain markdown with no weird formatting attached. This means no more typing into Apple Notes and then having to convert it to plain text, then SnapDropping the file to myself on PC. I can also easily pop over text files people send me throughout the day on my phone.

The one that genuinely caught me off guard was the image transfer. I attached a photo from my camera roll to a Dispatch message to extract information, but out of curiosity to see if it would work, I asked Claude to drop it in my vault, and it showed up in my vault on my PC. This is actually a huge win given I'm constantly screenshotting different states of my work in mobile editing apps. The image rides along on the Dispatch message the way any attachment would in a regular Claude chat - it goes through Anthropic's servers to reach my desktop session, and then Claude on my PC saves it to the folder. So yes, not quite a local setup, but local wasn't the main reason I'm using Obsidian anyway (it's the vault).

Claude is doing all the work

Dispatch is sort of a sync, but it's syncing intent rather than files. Obsidian Sync mirrors the vault between devices so the same files exist in two places, whereas Dispatch lets me operate on a vault that only ever lives in one place. My phone doesn't even have Obsidian installed right now and the vault never left my desktop, but I can still talk to it whenever. There's also a bunch of other stuff this opens up that I haven't fully leaned into yet, like daily note scaffolding on a schedule or having Claude pull a Safari link into a properly formatted note in the right folder.

The one caveat worth being honest about is that Dispatch is still in research preview, and the more complex you get with what you ask of it, the less reliable it tends to be. For the file ops stuff I've been doing it's been solid, but I wouldn't trust it yet with anything I couldn't easily undo.