An AI agent that uses your phone so you don't have to

What it does

Mika is a Kotlin Android app that takes a one-sentence request and carries it out on your phone. It opens apps on a private background screen — reading UIs, tapping, typing, scrolling — while you keep using your phone normally. It also ships a built-in desktop-class browser for web tasks, and a per-conversation Linux sandbox (Python, Node, shell) for processing files, with results saved to your Downloads folder.

The interesting bit

The background-screen trick is the core idea: the agent works on a separate virtual display, so automation doesn’t hijack your screen. It handles apps that draw their own unlabeled UIs via bundled OCR, and can hand off to you mid-task — logins, captchas, payments trigger a notification, you take over on the main screen, then Mika re-verifies and continues. There’s no Mika server; requests go only to whatever model provider you configure.

Key highlights

• Operates any installed app with no per-app adaptation — it looks at the screen like a human would
• Bring-your-own-key: presets plus any OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic, Gemini, or OpenAI Responses endpoint
• Plain-text knowledge files for ~20 apps and ~17 websites (WeChat, Amazon, BOSS直聘, YouTube…) speed up common flows; community-contributable
• Scheduled and conditional tasks (“every morning, only tell me if it rains”), interruptible mid-run with a resumable “continue”
• Encrypted on-device memory that only records facts you explicitly stated — never passwords or card numbers

Caveats

• Public beta, changing quickly; primarily tested on one Android 14 phone, so other devices may hit untested issues
• Tasks need Android 13+ (14+ recommended); the Linux sandbox is arm64-only and offline by default
• It operates third-party apps and websites on your behalf — the README itself points you at the disclaimer first

Verdict

Worth a look if you’ve wanted a phone agent that actually clicks things instead of just chatting. If you’re on an older Android device or expect production polish, wait a few releases.