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x-plug/mobileagent

8,661PythonAudience · researcherComplexity · 4/5Setup · hard

TLDR

An Alibaba research project that builds AI agents capable of controlling Android phones, Windows, macOS, and browsers by visually reading the screen, give it a plain-English task and it taps, types, and clicks to complete it without any app integrations.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((MobileAgent))
    What it does
      Screen-based control
      No API needed
      Plain English tasks
    Platforms
      Android phones
      Windows desktop
      macOS and browser
    AI models
      GUI-Owl-1.5
      2B to 235B params
      HuggingFace weights
    Try it
      ModelScope demo
      Cloud Android phone
      Local deployment
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Automate multi-step tasks on Android or desktop by describing what you want in plain English instead of writing scripts.

USE CASE 2

Run GUI agent benchmarks on Android, Windows, or macOS using state-of-the-art vision-language models from the GUI-Owl-1.5 family.

USE CASE 3

Try cloud-hosted Android phone control through Alibaba ModelScope without any local setup or GPU.

Tech stack

Python

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1day+

Requires downloading large AI model weights (2B, 235B parameters) from HuggingFace or ModelScope, GPU strongly recommended for local use.

In plain English

MobileAgent is a research project from Alibaba's Tongyi Lab that builds AI agents capable of operating mobile phones and computers by looking at the screen and taking actions, just as a person would. Instead of using APIs or special integrations with apps, these agents see the graphical interface visually and decide what to tap, type, or click in order to complete a task described in plain language. The project has gone through multiple versions. The current line includes Mobile-Agent-v3.5, which works across Android phones, desktop operating systems (Windows and macOS), and web browsers. It is built on top of GUI-Owl-1.5, a family of AI models the team also released publicly, available in sizes ranging from 2 billion to 235 billion parameters. These models understand screenshots, can locate specific interface elements on screen, and can carry out multi-step tasks from a single instruction. For longer or more complex tasks, the framework uses separate components for planning what to do next, tracking progress through a task, checking whether previous steps succeeded, and keeping relevant information in memory across steps. On standard benchmarks used to measure how well AI agents operate computers and phones, the project reports top results across more than 20 evaluation sets. For people who want to try it without local setup, Alibaba provides online demos through ModelScope and its Bailian cloud platform, including a cloud-hosted Android phone you can control remotely. For researchers and developers who want to run it locally, code and model weights are available on HuggingFace and ModelScope. The project received best demo awards at Chinese computational linguistics conferences in both 2024 and 2025, and earlier versions appeared at NeurIPS 2024 and ICLR workshops.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I want to use MobileAgent-v3.5 to automate a multi-step task on Android. Walk me through setting it up locally with the 2B GUI-Owl model.
Prompt 2
How do I connect MobileAgent to my macOS desktop so it can perform tasks by reading my screen? Show me the setup steps.
Prompt 3
I want to benchmark MobileAgent on standard GUI agent evaluation sets. Which metrics does it report and how do I run the evaluation script?
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