Minitap says Google's Artemis repository copied its open-source mobile-use code without credit

Minitap, a French mobile QA startup, said on 11 September that Google's Artemis repository contains code copied from its own Apache-licensed mobile-use project without attribution, and that a force push to Artemis in August replaced the original author names. Minitap's CEO Nicolas Dehandschoewercker published a blog post titled "I expected better from Google" that lists the matches and links to a public factual record with the archived files. Reveneau covered the Artemis release on 8 September as a Google Android automation agent with Model Context Protocol servers for Claude Code and Codex.

What Minitap says matches

Dehandschoewercker names four specific matches, each with a link to the file in both projects on Minitap's public factual record. The Android device connection code, he says, matches Minitap's implementation exactly. The Hopper agent's instructions in Artemis are word-for-word identical to Minitap's, and Minitap says the Hopper name came from one of its engineers who likes Minecraft. A WhatsApp example asks an agent to send Happy New Year messages to Alice, Bob and Charlie, with the same comments and cleanup steps as Minitap's version. An older version of the code also carried a shared bug: a helper wrote a results file and then failed when it tried to read its own output, which Minitap says it reproduced in both implementations before Artemis fixed it.

The force push, according to Minitap

An earlier package file in Artemis, Minitap says, listed three names: Pierre-Louis Favreau, Jean-Pierre Lo, and Nicolas Dehandschoewercker. Dehandschoewercker writes that a later version removed all three names and substituted another author, with no other change in the commit. He says GitHub's activity record shows the replacement happened through a force push in August, and links to the detached earlier version.

Minitap also says its results on the AndroidWorld leaderboard have been stuck at a December 2025 submission of 91.4%, that submissions of 94.8% and 100% went unanswered across four emails, and that Artemis's own comparison chart omitted mobile-use while listing an unrelated MadeAgents project called MobileUse at a lower score. Dehandschoewercker says Minitap has no evidence connecting the emails or the chart to the author-name removal.

The licence question

The mobile-use code compared in the post is under Apache 2.0. Section 4 of that licence requires a distributor to retain applicable copyright and attribution notices from the source form, to mark modified files, and to keep the contents of any NOTICE file. Minitap says the Artemis README it checked does not credit mobile-use.

Dehandschoewercker says Minitap has contacted Google and opened a public issue on the Artemis repository, asking it to acknowledge that Artemis is derived in part from mobile-use and correct the attribution. Google has not made a public statement on the claims. Reveneau did not independently verify the file comparisons or the git history.

For a team looking at Artemis, the picture around the project has changed while the code has not. For a team publishing under Apache 2.0, the post is a live example of the mechanics its licence is written against, from a maintainer willing to publish evidence.

Source

Nicolas Dehandschoewercker's post, I expected better from Google, with links to the file comparisons and the archived Artemis package files. Google's project is at google/artemis, and Minitap's mobile-use is at minitap-ai/mobile-use.