Smartphone camera system has the capability of being integrated into powerful field-sensing tools, capturing data and sharing these data with computing servers or cloud experts. The purpose of this work is to implement a wavefront sensor based on the smartphone platform, which has many potential applications in thin-films and bio-related sensing areas. To overcome problems caused by traditional wavefront curvature sensing setups, distorted micro-gratings are designed and introduced into the system in the dual role of both beam splitter and defocuser. The new design is capable of capturing two images of different levels of defocus in a single shot, which are then used as the input data to reconstruct the wavefront. Through testing with generated known spherical wavefronts, the smartphone based wavefront sensor has demonstrated decent system resolution and wavefront sensing accuracy.