An entire fake smartphone, built to house AI characters

What it does

This Next.js application renders a virtual phone inside your browser, populated by AI characters you create or import. The characters maintain long-term memory, follow daily schedules, and engage across multiple apps—private chat, group threads, a social feed, voice messages, and even red-envelope transfers. It is essentially a modular roleplay operating system where you bring your own LLM keys; the project provides no models itself.

The interesting bit

The “reality bridge” is the stand-out oddity: AI characters can trigger actual iPhone Shortcuts via Supabase edge functions, then continue the conversation after receiving real-world results like screenshots or sensor data. There is even an iOS AssistiveTouch mode that lets you screenshot your real screen and discuss it with a character inside a native iOS popup, all synced back to the in-browser chat thread.

Key highlights

• Persistent AI characters with memory, relationships, and simulated sleep/wake schedules
• Multiple story modes: visual novel, “phone checking,” interviews, map adventures, and diaries
• App market with an SDK for writing custom mini-apps and games
• Multimedia pipeline: AI image generation, Minimax voice synthesis, Netease music (self-hosted API), and 3D world building via Tripo
• Personal cloud deployment to user-owned Supabase projects for backups, WeChat bot integration, offline push, and scheduled messages
• PWA support with themes, wallpapers, stickers, and custom CSS so it can live on your actual phone home screen

Caveats

• The README is entirely in Chinese, so English-speaking contributors will need translation tools
• Most multimedia and cloud features require bringing your own API keys and self-hosted services (LLM, image gen, music, Supabase, Resend for the experimental email bridge)
• The project is extremely feature-dense; the README warns that copying its SQL setup scripts can be truncated, suggesting configuration is fiddly

Verdict

Worth exploring if you want a self-hosted Character.AI alternative with visual-novel mechanics and deep iOS integration. Skip it if you are looking for a simple chat wrapper—this is closer to a full-stack social simulation engine that happens to run in a tab.