OpenAI might be building a phone where AI agents replace your apps

There’s been a lot of chatter about OpenAI making hardware, mostly centered on those rumored earbuds. But analyst Ming-Chi Kuo just dropped something more interesting: a phone.

Kuo, who has a solid track record with Apple predictions, says OpenAI is working with MediaTek and Qualcomm on a custom smartphone chip. Luxshare would handle co-design and manufacturing. That’s a serious hardware stack for a company best known for chatbots.

The really juicy part? Kuo says this phone wouldn’t run apps the way we know them. Instead, AI agents would handle tasks directly. No App Store, no Google Play, no gatekeepers. OpenAI would control the entire hardware and software stack, meaning it could bake AI into every feature without begging Apple or Google for system-level access.

This isn’t just Kuo’s fantasy. Vibe coding app makers are already talking about an app-less future. Nothing CEO Carl Pei said the same thing at SXSW. The writing’s been on the wall for a while.

Kuo also claims the phone would be designed to continuously understand user context. That’s a polite way of saying it would vacuum up way more data than an app sitting inside someone else’s OS ever could. On-device small models would handle quick stuff, cloud models would take the heavy lifting. It’s the same hybrid approach we’re seeing everywhere now.

Timeline-wise, specs and suppliers should be locked by end of this year or Q1 2027, with mass production starting in 2028. That’s a long way off, but OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane already said the first hardware product is coming in the second half of 2026 — probably those earbuds.

I’ll believe a full-blown OpenAI phone when I see it. Building a chip is one thing. Building a phone that people actually want to use — without apps, no less — is a completely different beast. But if anyone has the user base to try, it’s the company pushing nearly a billion weekly active users through ChatGPT.

OpenAI didn’t comment on the story. They rarely do until something’s real.