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Show HN: Harness.apk – a drop-in on-device agent for Androidgithub.com

A full agentic loop delivered to your phone. Contribute to nev3rfail/harness.apk development by creating an account on GitHub.

1 points•nev3rfail•6 days ago•2 comments•
#agent#apk#harness#android#loop#device#device agent#full
The typical human-agent interaction loop currently looks as follows: operator writes a prompt, agent presents some options to choose from until the requirements become clear, does some work, and finally presents a report of what was actually done. This "specify > present" loop scales very well: you can specify a spaceship, a project at work, a vacation plan, or an omelette.

I got tired of specifying vacations and omelettes over SSH and remote sessions (which depend on a host somewhere to run the actual agent), and got tired of Claude Android's inability to write scripts to the filesystem or make me proper Maps routes, so here you go: harness.apk

The full agentic loop on a host that's already in your pocket and online 24/7, with rich widgets in writeups, and with hooks into everything the phone can do.

Its been my daily driver since the first version a month ago. Its been used to develop itself, even. Demo video is on the README.

Uses claude by default. Experience may vary

2 comments

qazer6 days ago
What is the main benefit of running the agent directly on the phone instead of Termux + SSH?

Is access to some android features or other benefits?

nev3rfail6 days ago
First and foremost: you don't need a machine to SSH into. When I'm on vacation, I can't count on my home server being up 24/7.

Secondly, yeah, Android / general interactivity features: it has a surface to propose edits/diffs, open dialogs, and show you rendered files, not just markdown in vim. Also: you take a picture and ask it to do something with it > it does. You ask it to put a route into google maps > it opens maps with the whole route placed properly.

And the killer: you can point it at a running browser with remote debugging enabled, and it can surf the internet on your behalf while you're sleeping. In general it can automate any interaction (via self-adb) if needed.

And my favourite: building and deploying android apps from android itself. Harness itself was built on the phone it runs on, and it works like a charm.

As a bonus: I've run this and a local Qwen as the model (hosted on my desktop's RTX 3090) — everything can be encapsulated in a true local-first environment.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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