PhoneCLI: From App Interfaces to Callable Commands for Mobile Agents

Recent advances in mobile agents are dominated by the GUI paradigm, in which agents perceive UI information and emit screen interactions. However, mobile platforms also expose a command-line interface (CLI) that provides direct access to device services and data. We argue CLI deserves first-class consideration alongside GUI. We evaluate three coding agents (Claude Code, Terminus-2, mini-swe-agent) across four model APIs on AndroidWorld and MobileWorld without any mobile-specific post-training, comparing against three reproducible GUI baselines (GUI-Owl-1.5-32B, MAI-UI, Qwen3-VL-32B). Claude Code (Opus 4.7) reaches 71.8% and 51.9%, outperforming every reproducible GUI baseline (69.3/68.1/57.8% on AndroidWorld; 43.2/26.3/13.3% on MobileWorld), while every other CLI configuration remains competitive. To establish the paradigm's ceiling, we provide oracle CLI solutions that reach 88.8% on AndroidWorld (103/116 tasks CLI-solvable) and 86.3% on MobileWorld (101/117 tasks CLI-solvable), indicating substantial room for future improvement. To cover everyday user intents beyond the GUI scope, we introduce the \textbf{CLI-Advantage Task Suite}, comprising 45 templates across five categories: bulk operations, multi-condition filtering, aggregation, cross-app workflows, and hidden device state. Every CLI agent outperforms every GUI baseline in all five categories, with substantially fewer steps per task (10.7 vs.\ 18.6). To support future research on mobile CLI agents, we will open-source agent implementations, oracle solutions, the CLI-Advantage suite, and evaluation infrastructure.

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

Phones are becoming an important execution surface for general-purpose agents, but training open models for reliable phone use remains difficult because the environment that matters at deployment, real devices running real apps, is slow, stateful, side-effectful, and hard to reset or verify, while scalable mock environments only approximate real behavior. We present PhoneBuddy, a training recipe and open-model line for agentic phone use that combines a real-app environment with a mock-app environment, PhoneWorld, which reconstructs runnable mock apps from real GUI usage structure. PhoneBuddy first builds a shared supervised fine-tuning stage from trajectories collected in both environments, then compares real-app RL against mixed RL across both environments. Across a 150-task human evaluation on real phones spanning apps, mini-apps, and cross-app workflows, task success rate improves from 36.67% after supervised fine-tuning to 40.67% after real-app RL and 45.33% after mixed RL. On AndroidWorld, the same progression rises from 60.3% to 77.2% to 83.2%. These results show that mock-app training is not a replacement for real-app RL, but a complementary source of scalable, resettable, and automatically checked interaction. The gains are strongest on app and mini-app tasks, while long-horizontal cross-app workflows remain an important open challenge.