ClawMobile: Rethinking Smartphone-Native Agentic Systems
Organizations: MBZUAI Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates · City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China · Independent Researcher Hong Kong, China
Abstract
Smartphones represent a uniquely challenging environment for agentic systems. Unlike cloud or desktop settings, mobile devices combine constrained execution contexts, fragmented control interfaces, and rapidly changing application states. As large language models (LLMs) evolve from conversational assistants to action-oriented agents, achieving reliable smartphone-native autonomy requires rethinking how reasoning and control are composed. We introduce ClawMobile as a concrete exploration of this design space. ClawMobile adopts a hierarchical architecture that separates high-level language reasoning from structured, deterministic control pathways, improving execution stability and reproducibility on real devices. Using ClawMobile as a case study, we distill the design principles for mobile LLM runtimes and identify key challenges in efficiency, adaptability, and stability. We argue that building robust smartphone-native agentic systems demands principled coordination between probabilistic planning and deterministic system interfaces. The implementation is open-sourced~\footnote{https://github.com/ClawMobile/ClawMobile} to facilitate future exploration.
Figures & tables
| App | Task | Completion Ratio | E2E Execution Time (s) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DR | CM-w/o-DR | CM | DR | CM-w/o-DR | CM | ||
| Settings | Turn on the dark theme for the system | 100% | 100% | 100% | 26 | 22 | 21 |
| Chrome | Search result for today’s gold price in USD in Chrome App | 73% | 100% | 100% | 26 | 67 | 67 |
| Google Play | Install RedNote App from Play Store | 33% | 100% | 100% | 29 | 232 | 117 |
| YouTube | Open the YouTube App, play the MV of Ed Sheeran’s Bad Habits, and skip or close the Ad if available | 100% | 80% | 100% | 66 | 600 | 88 |
| YouTube | Open the MV of Ed Sheeran’s Bad Habits on the YouTube App and open ‘Comments’ to comment ‘I love this song very much’ | 85% | 50% | 100% | 121 | 600 | 235 |
Mobile GUI Agents
Mobile GUI agents use visual and structured interface information to carry out tasks across smartphone apps.
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