It’s just an MCP server for the phone with an app to control it, basically computer use, but for Android. Agents using computers are already normal, so I’m not sure why phones would be different. And it runs on your own plan, or on local models if you’d rather keep it off the cloud entirely.
Fair question, so here are real ones:
It asks before anything is sent or bought and stops when you touch the screen. Not for everyone, and that’s fine.
Thanks, and thanks for the crosspost! Local models already work: in Settings you can add a custom OpenAI-compatible address (llama.cpp, Ollama or LM Studio on your network) and use it with OpenCode. It works best with models that are good at tool calling, since everything goes through phone tools.
Other devices: it’s built for phones, but someone already forked it to run on a Nintendo Switch with Android, with Joy-Con navigation: https://github.com/Lendss/buddy-switch. So other Android devices are clearly possible, I just haven’t tested watches, TVs or XR myself.
F-Droid: good timing. Buddy now builds all its native parts (proot, talloc and friends) from source in CI, with no prebuilt binaries in the repo, which was the main thing in the way. So an F-Droid build should be doable now. Until then, releases are on GitHub and the app updates itself.
Fair concern, and it’s not for everyone. The agent only sees the screen while it’s doing a task you gave it, it asks before anything is sent, and it’s open source, so you can check exactly what it does. If you’d rather not hand that to an AI, that’s a completely reasonable choice.
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.