Image: Pinky
Why it mattersLetting an agent touch a phone opens banking, chat and photos. Pinky holds the risky taps at a gateway the agent cannot rewrite.
Letting a coding agent reach into your phone is cheap to try and hard to undo. One buggy tap can send money, mute a chat, or wipe a photo roll. Pinky, a new open-source app from DIYgod, the maker of RSSHub, wants to fix the undoing half. The agent runs on your computer. Pinky sits between it and the phone. It asks you first before any payment, transfer, password, or one-time code. Pinky says every approval is held at its gateway, in code the agent cannot rewrite. The repository is Apache-2.0. It ranks 20th on Trendshift's daily list today, with 285 stars added in the past week.
What it does
Pinky is a small desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux. It talks to one phone over USB or Wi-Fi: Android 10 to 17, or iPhone on iOS 17.4 and later. Any agent that speaks MCP can drive it: the README names Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex and Cursor. The download is 16 to 22 MB. Pinky says idle memory is about 70 MB and idle CPU is zero percent.
The agent gets a screen reader, a tap and swipe tool, a keyboard, and nothing else. Risky actions pause. These are payments, transfers, password fields and one-time codes. The phone's screen shows the request. The app waits for your tap. Pinky recognises the buttons in ten languages for the approval step.
Where it hides your data
Screenshots and recordings of the phone's screen stay on your computer for 30 days, and you can change that. Banking apps and password managers are invisible to the agent by default. They are on a hidden list the gateway refuses to send to the model. Password fields and one-time code boxes block the agent's keyboard until you type in them yourself. On Android 13 and later, Pinky says the agent can work on a hidden second display. Your phone screen is still yours.
What it does not do yet
Pinky calls itself pre-alpha. The README says Claude Code has driven a real phone end to end. Other agents are still in test. iPhone users on iOS before 27 need WebDriverAgent installed through Xcode. That is a build step Android users do not have. Android needs USB debugging on, and an optional helper app for faster screen reads and non-English typing. The project asks for no account, and there is no cloud of any kind.
A coding agent that can reach a phone opens a long list of new questions. Who owns the session. What counts as approval. Whether a screenshot is kept. Pinky's answer is to put the approval rules in code the agent cannot rewrite. Teams building agent products on their own apps can read Pinky for the shape of a safe control surface. That is useful even if the user never leaves the desktop.
Source
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
Get AI News in your inbox
New developer tools, model and agent releases, and how teams are actually using them to release software. Short, and only when there is something worth reading.