# Reach new heights of laziness by burning tokens to let an AI tap your smartphone screen for you

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/reach-new-heights-of-laziness-by-burning-tokens-to-let-an-ai-tap-your-smartphone-screen-for-you/
- Published: 2026-10-21T20:13:33+00:00
- Updated: 2026-10-21T21:25:12+00:00
- Original publisher: The Register
- Original article: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/21/reach-new-heights-of-laziness-by-burning-tokens-to-let-an-ai-tap-your-smartphone-screen-for-you/5304567
- Topics: AI, Art, Culture, Gadgets, Technology

## Key points

- Opposable lets AI agents control smartphone screens.
- Example tasks took up to 96 seconds.
- In tests, it completed only three or four of eight tasks unaided.

## Summary

Opposable is a tool that lets AI agents operate smartphone screens by tapping, swiping and typing on a user’s behalf. Its launch highlights the trade-off in automating simple phone tasks: the system can be slow, unreliable and costly, even when those tasks are quick to do manually or with a phone’s built-in assistant.

On Android, Opposable uses accessibility services and screenshots, with a vision-language model to work out where to tap; around 40 common actions instead run through fixed code. Its examples took 50 seconds and 17 tool calls to switch to dark mode and set a timer, nearly two minutes to answer an Apollo 11 query at a cost of $0.44, and 96 seconds to open a stopwatch. In tests on eight unfamiliar tasks, it succeeded three or four times out of eight; checking each subgoal raised success to six out of eight in both rounds. iPhones need a companion computer, while Android can also run an on-device agent.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.