Carbon.now.sh loads on an iPhone. That is not the same as working on one.

Carbon is the reference tool for turning code into an image, it is open source, it has over 36,000 stars on GitHub, and on a desktop it deserves every one of them. This page is not an argument against it. It is about what happens when you open it on a phone, because the answer is worse than most people expect and nobody says so out loud.

What actually goes wrong

The control bar is built for a cursor. Carbon's whole design premise is that everything is adjustable — theme, font, padding, window style, background, export scale. On a desktop that is a row of dropdowns you skim. On a 390-point screen it is a stack of small targets you hunt for, and each one you open covers the preview you are adjusting.

Pasting code into a browser text area is not fun. The editor is a web input. Selection handles, the caret, and autocorrect all behave like they do in any other web field on iOS, which is to say not like a code editor. Getting a snippet in cleanly is the first fight.

Export goes through the browser. You get a download rather than the share sheet. On iOS that means the file lands somewhere and then you go find it, instead of moving straight into the app you were posting from.

Nothing is remembered in a way you can rely on. Every visit starts near defaults. If you post code images regularly with a consistent look, you are re-making the same decisions on the worst possible input device.

None of this is a flaw in Carbon. It is a web app designed for a desktop, being used somewhere it was not designed for.

The honest options

Disclosure up front: we make Codeshot, a paid app. It is one of the options below, and the section on it says who should not buy it.

Use Carbon on your Mac and stop trying on the phone. Genuinely the right answer for a lot of people. If the image can wait until you are at a desk, this costs nothing and Carbon is excellent there.

Use ray.so on the phone. ray.so has far fewer options than Carbon, which is exactly why it survives a small screen better — there is less to hunt for. It is still a web page, so the paste and export problems remain, but the middle part is much less painful. Free.

Use a native app. This is a thinner field than you would guess. Most tools in this category are web pages; the native iOS apps that handle code are editors like Textastic and Koder, which are not screenshot tools. Codeshot is native on iPhone: paste from the clipboard in one tap, 30 themes, 60 languages detected from the code, ratio presets, and export straight into the share sheet. It is $5.99, one purchase covering Mac and iPhone.

Do not use the screenshot button. Whatever else you choose. A phone screenshot of code captures your phone's width rather than your code's, and it is already wrapped before you press anything.

How to choose

Ask where the code is when you want a picture of it.

Already on your Mac — use Carbon there. This page is not for you.

On your phone, occasionally — ray.so in Safari. A free tool you use twice a month does not need replacing.

On your phone, regularly — this is the case a native app is actually for. Not because the web tools cannot produce the image, but because doing it weekly through a browser means fighting the same three things every time.

Under an NDA, client work, an unreleased feature — that rules out every browser tool including Carbon, on the plain grounds that the code goes into a web page. Whether that matters is a question for someone above you, not for you.

The part that has not changed

Carbon is still the best free option on a desktop, still open source, and still the tool that made this entire category exist. If you only ever make code images at a computer, none of this applies to you.

For why the native field is so thin in the first place, see Code Screenshot Apps for iPhone. For the wider desktop field — editor extensions, CLI tools, the rest — see 7 Carbon.now.sh Alternatives in 2026, or Carbon vs ray.so for the two web tools compared directly.

If you have decided the phone is where this needs to happen, How to Screenshot Code on iPhone walks through it end to end.