Nothing will ruin your faith in humanity like an AI that operates your smartphone slowly, struggles with basic tasks, and can charge you for it

Why use your smartphone when AI can do it for you? We’ve reached a new level of AI inanity with the launch of Opposable, a tool that taps, swipes, and types on Android phones and controls iPhones through a companion computer, sparing users the apparent burden of operating their own devices.

If you don't want to update a calendar event, start a timer, or enable dark mode, you can apparently use an AI agent app on your computer (any client that supports MCP will do) to have Opposable do the thing for you on a connected phone. 

You could just do it on your computer, of course, but that’d require actually using your hands - like it’s some sort of baby’s toy. Lame. 

Opposable describes the purpose of its app as being to “give your AI thumbs” that allow an agent to open apps, read the screen, tap, and type, all while signed in to a device as the person too lazy to use a super-convenient technology themselves. 

As described in a blog post published by its creators Wednesday, Opposable's developers explain that its Android implementation uses accessibility services to inspect the screen, while screenshots provide visual input for an AI model. The model then decodes the images and figures out where it needs to tap on the screen in order to do whatever its user asked of it. 

The visual processing is handled by a vision-language model known as GUI-Owl 1.5 2B, running through llama.cpp, while tasks can be handled by either a paired desktop AI agent or an on-device agent that works without a desktop connection (the latter is available only on Android devices – iPhones require a companion computer, with a Mac beta available and a hardware-assisted Windows/Linux option also advertised).

Even then, AI isn’t used for everything, with around 40 common tasks (setting an alarm, sending a text, switching Wi-Fi on or off) running as fixed code without an AI model involved. 

Opposable doesn’t appear to be particularly fast, however, and its accuracy is questionable too. Opposable’s website includes three different examples of tasks executed using its product, and none seem to merit using an AI over, you know, human hands. 

In one example, Claude Code over MCP is used to change the system’s theme to dark mode and then set a five-minute timer. This takes 50 seconds and requires 17 tool calls. In a second example using Claude Code and MCP, Opposable is asked to look up when Apollo 11 launched and who was on board, which takes just shy of 2 minutes. The number of tool calls isn’t mentioned, but the run cost is $0.44, which seems ridiculous when you can use your hands and figure it out for free. Hell, just asking Gemini or Siri right on a smartphone would return the answer faster and cheaper. 

Those half-a-buck requests to Opposable could add up pretty quickly if you’re lazy enough to justify its use. 

A third example shows a virtual Android device operating without a paired desktop agent, instead relying on the on-device agent that Opposable installs on Android phones. Opening the clock app and switching to the stopwatch tab takes it about 96 seconds, which is supposed to be impressive, apparently, as the company behind Opposable decided to showcase it on the thing’s website. 

As for Opposable’s ability to actually accomplish tasks, well, that’s not exactly a sure thing. 

“On eight tasks the model had never been tuned on, run on the emulator twice each, giving it the whole task succeeded 4 and 3 times,” the blog post notes. I’m pretty sure my brain and hands can do better without burning tokens to fail. 

“Giving it one subgoal at a time and checking each claimed success against the accessibility tree before the next subgoal succeeded 6 times in both rounds,” the blog continues - so even when it gets babysat each step of the way, it still only succeeds at three-quarters of tasks. Cool - that’s really going to free up all that time wasted setting timers and doing other mundane tasks on my handset. 

Why someone would install this on their Android device - which requires sideloading an APK and manually granting access to read and interact with the screen through accessibility settings - seems like a bit of a mystery. Opposable’s website even warns that it could be a security disaster: “whoever holds the token can operate the phone, so treat it like a password,” but still invites users to try. 

An argument could be made for using Opposable as an accessibility tool for people with difficulty using a smartphone, but this isn’t mentioned anywhere on its website. Opposable is instead billed as a way to “hand off the phone chores,” leaving users free to do something else - just not on the phone currently being slowly controlled by a clumsy AI. 

Sure, you could give your AI some virtual thumbs through Opposable, but … why? We reached out to the Opposable team to get an answer to that question, but didn’t hear back. ®