A novel concept towards pervasively available low-cost infrared thermal imaging system lunched on a mobile phone (MTIS) was proposed and demonstrated in this article. Through digestion on the evolutional development of milestone technologies in the area, it can be found that the portable and low-cost design would become the main stream of thermal imager for civilian purposes. As a representative trial towards this important goal, a MTIS consisting of a thermal infrared module (TIM) and mobile phone with embedded exclusive software (IRAPP) was presented. The basic strategy for the TIM construction is illustrated, including sensor adoption and optical specification. The user-oriented software was developed in the Android environment by considering its popularity and expandability. Computational algorithms with non-uniformity correction and scene-change detection are established to optimize the imaging quality and efficiency of TIM. The performance experiments and analysis indicated that the currently available detective distance for the MTIS is about 29 m. Furthermore, some family-targeted utilization enabled by MTIS was also outlined, such as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) prevention, etc. This work suggests a ubiquitous way of significantly extending thermal infrared image into rather wide areas especially health care in the coming time.