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Ghost Hands Mobile
A goal-driven web agent that runs entirely on your phone.
Give it a goal in plain words. It plans, browses, reads, and acts on its own, using a language model that lives on the device. No cloud brain, no account, no data leaving the phone.
v3.16.0 current release
1,738 host tests, green in CI
4 permissions, total
MIT licensed
How it works
- Brain on device. Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct runs through llama.cpp in the app. It downloads once (about 1 GB, pinned by SHA-256) and is never bundled.
- Eyes. A WebView stage plus JavaScript perception builds a numbered map of each page. On a stable page the planner gets only the delta from the last map, 75% fewer map tokens.
- Governor. Every action is classified (readonly / write / consequential), checked against policy packs, domain rules, and site grants, and written to a trail before it runs. Purchases, submits, and executable downloads ask first.
- Trail. Every run leaves a complete record: decisions, actions, approvals, corrections. If it did it, the trail says so.
What it can do today
- Research goals with grounded answers: a fact it claims must trace to something it actually read.
- Forms: selects, radio groups, checkboxes, dates, multi-field forms as first-class actions.
- Up to 3 tabs at once, with per-tab memory and answer grounding isolated per tab.
- Governed downloads (archives and executables ask first), document reading, and page watches that report what changed.
- Watched and scheduled checks, voice goals, clarifying questions mid-run, and resume after an interrupted run.
How it compares
| Axis | Ghost Hands Mobile | Cloud assistants |
|---|
| Where the brain runs | On the phone | In a data center |
| Works offline | Yes, after model download | No |
| Governance | Approvals, deny rules, full audit trail | Varies, rarely a trail |
| Reach | The browser (today) | Apps and system, on flagship phones |
| Speed | Slow: roughly 20 to 40 seconds a step | Fast |
| Price | Free, MIT | Subscription or flagship hardware |
The gaps are printed on purpose: cloud assistants are faster and reach further into the phone. Ghost Hands trades that for privacy, governance, and a trail you can audit. The full sourced comparison lives in the repository roadmap work.
Install
Ghost Hands is a sideloaded APK, not a Play Store app. Builds are distributed by Ghost Developer Studio directly; the source and build recipe are public:
- Package
com.ghosthands.app, min Android 7 (SDK 24), target SDK 34.
- Permissions, the whole set:
INTERNET, ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, RECORD_AUDIO (voice goals only), VIBRATE.
- Build it yourself:
cd v1 && ./run-host-tests.sh && ./build-apk.sh
Honest limits
- Steps are slow by cloud standards. A 1.5B model on a mid-range phone is not a data center.
- Perception covers the top document's visible elements. Iframes, shadow DOM, and canvas UIs read as sparse maps.
- Several field passes are still owed on real devices. They are tracked as public issues, not hidden.