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.
People are so mean these days, show some support
Name a single good reason that I should support this
It sounds, in theory, a lot easier to use compared to doing everything manually via TalkBack. There’s a very long running podcast called The Phones Show Chat and one of their regular guests is a vision-impaired man. Many of the AI features on phones that sighted people scoff at have been transformative for him, it’s very interesting. I’m not saying this would necessarily be great for him, but listening to his experience using his phone has taught me not to write-off new technologies just because I can’t find my own use case for them.
If the backdoor was intentional, you could see it as donating compute resources to the devs token maxing addiction
One: someone who can’t see the screen can just talk to it, with live voice, and it does the tapping and reads things back. For a lot of people, that’s the difference between using a phone app themselves and needing someone to do it for them.
Something wrong with the old voice access?
I’d be worried something as unpredictable as an LLM would put more disabled users in danger that it would help.
Everything related to AI gets down voted. Controversial at best.
Youre god damn right it does.
Curious why. Seems people vote against datacenters in their vicinity, against the flood of self-promote by AI agents in the remaining somewhat human corners of the internet, against the flood of dubious vibe-coded projects which for some reason all have the same description that starts with “I built …”