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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to App Use – Enable AI to control your mobile apps

Hey HN! I built an open-source Python library that lets AI agents control mobile apps. Its heavily inspired by browser-use Here's a quick demo https://x.com/itsericktorres/status/1932996729458110482 From our experience testing mobile workflows or automate repetitive app tasks has always been a pain. You either write brittle UI automation scripts or do everything manually. And after testing out browser-use and seeing all the cool things people were building for web without the pains of normal automation I decided I wanted to build something like it but for mobile So I…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Work with a powerful coding assistant anywhere

    2025 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    We enable AI to control your browser

    2025 · browser-use.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I've been building computer-use tools for a while, and I quietly launched this about a month ago (122 Stars on GH). I figured it was worth sharing here. Over the last few months, a lot of computer-use agents have come out: Codex, Claude Code, CUA, and others. Most of them seem to work roughly like this: 1. Take a screenshot 2. Have the model predict pixel coordinates 3. Click x,y 4. Take another screenshot 5. Repeat That works, but it's slow, expensive in tokens, and fragile. If the UI shifts a few pixels, things break. And the model still doesn't know what any element actually is. But the…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Atomic▲140

    Hey HN, I’ve been building Atom (https://github.com/rush86999/atom), an open-source, self-hosted AI automation platform. I built this because while tools like OpenClaw are excellent for one-off scripts and personal tasks, I found them difficult to use for complex business workflows (e.g., managing invoices or SaaS ops). The main issue was State Blindness: the agent would fire a command and assume it worked, without "seeing" if the UI or state actually updated. I just shipped a new architecture to solve this called Canvas AI Accessibility. The Technical Concept: Instead of…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey Hackers! I've had this idea stuck in my head for a while: what if an AI could actually use my browser for me? I mean, not on some virtual machine in the cloud like ChatGPT agent, but right on my own browser. I finally decided to just build it and see what would happen. I wrote a quick MVP, and honestly, I didn't expect much. But then... it started doing things. On its own. It figured out how to use search engine to find what I needed, read a webpage to answer my questions, and even it can organize my chaotic mess of tabs into neat groups. It was a genuine "whoa" moment for me. That's…

    2025 · browserfly.app · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Comet is the first agentic AI browser built for mobile.

    Nov 2025 · perplexity.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hi HN! I want to share our latest project at NEXA AI. We developed AI agent foundation models designed to transform how developers create AI agent powered apps. One major challenge we've observed with current human-computer interactions is that many simple, one-step tasks become unnecessarily complex, multi-step workflows due to limitations of current GUIs. AI agents can solve this, but existing AI agent models are slow and costly. To tackle these issues, we built lightweight AI agent models based on our Octopus V2, small language models for function calling (You can learn more about our…

    2024 · nexa4ai.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    GetBot▲100

    Generate content, email response, image generation

    2023 · getbot.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Our mobile browser's battery optimised AI will secure BYOD

    2025 · wootz.app · its alternatives →

  10. 10WR

    What's up HN! This is Jared and Art. We met on HN and started building together. Over the last few months we've been thinking a lot about how AI agents are going to impact the future. We want agents to be something that's actually useful for normal people as well as the 10x'ers. This lead us to building Meha over the last few months, our first swing at our vision! We saw OpenAI release Operators then we said f*k it let's post. Meha is a desktop app that uses your Chrome browser to execute tasks in the background. It controls your installed Chrome browser and uses LLMs with playwright to plan…

    2025 · meha.ai · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey everyone, I made this thing: https://tryflux.ai/. Here's a demo video: https://screen.studio/share/1y2EnC26 Context: I've tried probably 15 different AI apps over the past year. ChatGPT, note-taking apps, productivity apps, all of it. But most of them are just clutter on my iphone. They live in some app I have to deliberately open. And I just... don't. But you know what I open 50 times a day without thinking? iMessage. So out of mild frustration with the "AI app graveyard" on my phone, I built Flux. What it does: - You describe a personality and what…

    Jan 2026 · tryflux.ai · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    AI-powered mobile app development

    2025 · appbuildchat.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Control your custom agents with a mobile voice assistant

    2024 · mobile.openagent.studio · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hey HN. We built an AI agent, Avid, that creates beautiful Flutter Apps, much like v0 or Lovable. The agent carefully makes UI UX considerations, generates Flutter code, and you get a preview on your browser. I've gone through lots and lots of iterations to help the agent produce beautiful results. Would love your feedback. Ability to download App files and flutter code should be ready this coming week. Have a look and let me know what you think!

    2025 · getavid.dev · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Make mini-sites, collages, mixed media blogs, and more

    2024 · housewarming.me · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    It’s powered by OpenAI’s GPT 4.1 model. Uses Xcode UI tests + accessibility tree to look into apps, and performs swipes, taps, etc to get things done.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi HN I recently got married, promptly had a bit of a meltdown, and decided to lock myself in a room and build for a while. At the same time, I was trying to outbound sell for my startup and kept running into the same problem: I wanted an automation tool that could actually use my computer like a person. Click through UIs, copy/paste between apps, handle messy workflows — not just APIs and webhooks. I couldn’t find anything that felt: - consumer-friendly (non-technical) - local-first - flexible enough for real-world, UI-driven tasks So I challenged myself to see how far I could get…

    Jan 2026 · automatewithtasker.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Generate wireframes and real apps with AI + Python

    Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Demo of LOCAL Browser agent (powered by Web GPU Liquid LFM & Alibaba Qwen models) opening the All in Podcast on Youtube running as a chrome extension. Source: https://github.com/RunanywhereAI/on-device-browser-agent Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1qh10q9/comment... Geting in the support for web sdk soon, meanwhile have full support for mobile sdks : https://github.com/RunanywhereAI/runanywhere-sdks

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Build mobile apps fast with AI

    2025 · appalchemy.ai · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    That's a bold claim. But I genuinely feel like I might have actually solved computer use (demo: https://x.com/mdlahfir/status/2088109763783700827?s=20) For context, I've been building agent-desktop (Inspired by agent-browser by Vercel Labs), an automation CLI for desktop apps. It's like Playwright but for desktops, not just native, but for Chromium apps as well. Trust me, yes, Chromium apps whose accessibility tree is dense. MacOS is GA; I'm almost close to launching for Windows and Linux! So, how did I solve it? Basically interoperability. The biggest issue with…

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    AI-guided smartphone automations

    2025 · mobileuse.app · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hi HN, I'm Cristina from CommandBar (YC S20). You've heard how lack of focus kills startups. We were afraid of this too. So for the past 3 years, we built “user assistance” tools for desktop and web apps only. (Stuff like an embedded Copilot trained on your product, cmd+k search, nudges, etc.) It took a lot of self-convincing but we’ve decided to finally launch all of this for mobile today too. In hindsight, we actually regret not doing it sooner. The more we dug into customer feedback, the more we realized how much more pronounced the problems we're solving on desktop are on mweb and native…

    2023 · commandbar.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Now AI tests your apps. Local-first, controllable and secure

    2025 · agentiqa.com · its alternatives →

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