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Buddy: an open source app that lets AI agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode) use your Android phone (github.com)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/android@lemdro.id
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I've been building Buddy, a free, open source (Apache 2.0) Android app. You type or say what you want in a floating bubble, and an AI agent reads the screen, taps and types through your apps to do it.

  • Your choice of agent: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Antigravity or Grok, running inside the app (Alpine Linux via proot) on your own plan. OpenCode's free models need no account.
  • No root, adb or PC: it reads the screen and taps through the accessibility service.
  • Asks first: before anything is sent, posted, bought or deleted. It pauses when you touch the screen and never types passwords or payment details.
  • Builds apps: with Linux tools on, it builds real APKs on the phone. This week I drew a maze on a paper towel, took a photo, and it made it a tilt game. The first build crashed on launch; it found the bug and fixed it.

To be upfront:

  • What the agent reads on your screen goes to the AI service you pick.
  • It's early (2.2), tested most on a OnePlus 12 with Android 16.
  • It's not on Play (Google rejected the accessibility use), so it's an APK from GitHub releases, built by GitHub Actions from the source.

Source and releases: github.com/ghorbelhamdi/buddy-android

Happy to answer questions here.

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[–] 2 points 1 day ago* (2 children)

It's is expected, they're small models. But something like Qwen 3.8 27B or Qwen 3.8 Flash Next should handle it.

How much VRAM do you have? If it's a 12GB card and you also happens to have 64 GB of RAM, you should be able to run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with Q3. It's one of the most "hyped" local models right now (because it's quite capable and has somewhat realistic HW requirements).

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 child)

    Update: you were right. Qwen3.8 27B (unsloth UD-IQ3_XXS) did the calculator task correctly (1234×5678 = 7,006,652), but took 18 minutes on my 8 GB card, almost all of it reading the prompt and screen on the CPU.

    Qwen3.5 9B is the interesting one: one run typed the wrong numbers and claimed success, the next did it right in about 2 minutes. So small models can do it, just not reliably yet.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 38 minutes ago)

    Yeah, 27B only usable if you can fit it entirely in VRAM. Only MoE models are fine to split, like the mentioned Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Even though it's large, only the active 6B parameters needs to be located in VRAM, the rest can be in RAM and SSD.

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