Phone Harness (YC F26) open-sources a harness that lets AI agents control real phones
ycombinator · x · 2026-11-05
Phone Harness, a YC F26 startup, open-sourced a tool that lets AI agents tap, type and scroll through real iPhone/Android apps — no jailbreak, no API, no app install. Vision OCR or the accessibility tree serves as eyes; iPhone connects via iPhone Mirroring (works in background), Android via adb, with MCP, CLI or API access. Cloud pricing: Android emulators at 5¢/minute ($5 free credit), Plus at $20/mo with 1,000 minutes, real iPhones at $80–100/mo. Selling points include real phone numbers with SMS/2FA handling, persistent logins, and the ability to run hundreds of devices at once.
More from coding & agent
- Agent Arena: frontier models show 55-minute gap on long-horizon agent tasks — arena · 2026-11-05
- Agent-based kernel optimization faces a fidelity-throughput tradeoff: random data misleads, cold starts cost 12.7 minutes — simran_s_arora · 2026-11-05
- Solo dev builds window-free OS where a local Qwen3.5 9B generates every screen — leonardo_c · 2026-11-05
- Apple team ships Siri Evaluations: don't skip evals when wiring App Intents into Siri AI — rudrank · 2026-11-05
- RECAP: RL recipe for context compaction in long-horizon agents, +4.3pp on SWE-bench — Michael_D_Moor · 2026-11-05
- MCP proxy that blocks exfil addresses from tool output: 48/164 attacks to 0, but blocks legit sends too — eccentric_ez · 2026-11-05