I turned my Android phone into a personal MCP memory server — Claude finally knows who I am

Vadym Cherkavskyi — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:47:42 +0000

Every time I open Claude, it forgets me.

My name. My projects. My preferences. The conversation we had yesterday. Gone.

The obvious solution is a memory MCP server. There are plenty of them — Mem0, OpenMemory, MemGPT. But they all have the same problem: your data goes to their cloud. You're solving one problem (AI forgets you) by creating another (a company owns your memories).

I wanted something different. I wanted my AI memory to live on hardware I physically own. Something I could unplug.

So I built MemPlato — a personal MCP memory server that runs directly on an Android phone.

How it works
The architecture is simple:

Your Android phone → relay.memplato.com → Claude / Perplexity / Cursor

The MCP server runs locally on the phone. A relay routes external requests to it. Your data never touches anyone else's storage — it lives in a SQLite database on your device.

Setup takes 3 steps:

Install the app

See your personal URL (e.g. relay.memplato.com/u/YOUR_ID/mcp)

Paste it into Claude, Perplexity, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI

That's it. No accounts. No API keys. No subscriptions.

What it actually stores
MemPlato has 29 MCP tools. The main ones:

Memory Palace (drawers) — store anything as text in an organized structure. Wings → Rooms → Drawers. Like a filing cabinet that AI can read and write.

Knowledge Graph — facts with time validity. Vadym works_on MemPlato (since 2026-01-01). AI can query what was true at any point in time.

Semantic Search — ONNX-based vector search running locally on the phone. Ask "what do I know about my Flutter project?" and get ranked results.

Agent Diary — AI assistants can write compressed session notes to remember what they worked on with you.

Tunnels — cross-link related memory areas. Connect your coding project notes to your investor notes to your personal context.

The honest technical story
I'm a solo founder from Ukraine. Not a professional developer. Building this took months of debugging things I didn't fully understand.

The hardest part wasn't the MCP protocol — Anthropic's spec is solid. The hardest part was keeping the server alive on a mobile device.

Android kills background processes aggressively. The relay has to stay connected. Battery optimization fights you constantly. I went through ngrok (changes URL on restart), Cloudflare Tunnel (doesn't work on Android), and finally landed on a $5/month Vultr VPS running a persistent SSH reverse tunnel.

The server passed 62/62 MCP tests. Including the ones I wrote specifically to break it.

Why your phone and not a Raspberry Pi?
A few reasons:

You already have it. Most people don't have a spare Pi lying around.

It has a battery. Survives power outages.

It has mobile data. Works when your home internet goes down.

It's personal. The phone that knows your face also knows your AI context.

The philosophical answer: your AI memory should be as personal and as portable as your phone itself.

Current state
MemPlato is open source: github.com/VChe-creator/memplato

The Python MCP server is ready and working. The Flutter Android app that auto-installs everything is in development.

If you want to try it now, you can run the Python server manually on any Android phone with Termux. Instructions are in the README.

I'd genuinely love feedback from people who care about AI privacy and self-hosted tools. What would you want your personal AI memory server to do that this doesn't?

DEV Community: Vadym Cherkavskyi

I turned my Android phone into a personal MCP memory server — Claude finally knows who I am