Can you upload files to ChatGPT on a phone?

The limits are the same

Worth stating, because people assume mobile gets a smaller allowance.

They are account limits, so the two devices share one pool. Three uploads on your phone in the morning means none left on your laptop that afternoon, on the Free plan.

Where phones are genuinely worse

Getting at the file. The document is often in email, or in a cloud drive, or on a computer somewhere else. Getting it into the app is more steps than dragging it into a browser window.

Photographing instead of uploading. The camera is right there, so people photograph a page. That works for one or two pages, since images are read directly. It does not work for a report, because a phone photo of text is an image and not a text file, and there is a ceiling of about 100 images per conversation with PDF pages counting toward it too.

Long documents. Anything needing to be split into parts is miserable to manage on a phone, and the tools that automate splitting are browser extensions, which mobile cannot run.

What works well on a phone

A short document you already have. A single PDF in your email, a text file in your cloud drive. Straightforward.

One or two pages photographed. Reading a sign, a form, a page of a book. This is what the camera is genuinely good for.

A screenshot. Fine, and often the quickest way to ask about something on screen.

Continuing work you started on a computer. The conversation is on your account, so a document uploaded from your laptop is still there in the phone app.

Extensions do not run on mobile

Chrome on Android and iOS does not support extensions. Not ours, not any of them.

This is a limitation of mobile Chrome rather than of any individual extension, and no product can work around it. Anything promising a mobile browser extension is describing something that does not exist.

The sensible split

Phone: short documents, photographs of a page or two, screenshots, and continuing a conversation you started elsewhere.

Computer: anything long, anything needing splitting, and anything where you want the whole document read rather than the first part of it.

The conversation follows you between them, so starting on a laptop and continuing on a phone works fine. It is only the getting-it-in step that wants a computer.