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Comment by ssivark | Hacker News Reader

The time is ripening to disrupt Android/iOS. The place to start would be to rethink the device around AI. No need for apps or messy integrations with third-party crap. Just a simple device with a great new UX (not typing on a touchpad!) that is slick and does a few things very well (personal agent, coordinating with your personal knowledge base, handling external communications and your interface with the world). This could very easily supplant a phone.

AI is rapidly getting to such a place where the you don't really need a developer ecosystem to get your device off the ground. As "plugins" into your agent at some later point -- sure, why not.

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You want a phone that "does a few things very well" and then you list "personal agent" and "your interface with the world". This would encompass everything anyone does with a phone, except maybe interacting with creative media (video games, ebooks). That's the exact opposite of "a few things". I think you're confusing actual functionality with AI marketing phrases.

The problem is that although what most people use on a daily basis is small nearly everyone uses something unusual app for _something_. I think it would be quite hard to find a market large enough that didn’t include such people.

There is a solution sitting there, which is running Android and having the AI run it behind the scenes I guess, but is suspect that would end up looking a lot like we have now.

Or have an agent read the APK and make new software based on it.

This is the fundamental problem with all of these hypothetical new devices. If you assume you can come up with some new UI or innovative interaction model, maybe it’s purely voice or whatever else, then you have to ask if this could just run on a phone.

Modern smartphones won’t be supplanted by tech that could just run on a phone. That doesn’t make any sense. For any new tech to take off and replace phones, it has to provide something that isn’t simply additive to the phone. Otherwise, it just makes more sense to build it into the existing phone.

“A phone, but it has AI and no apps” isn’t even additive. It’s purely a loss of functionality.

> “A phone, but it has AI and no apps” isn’t even additive. It’s purely a loss of functionality.

I don't necessarily agree that “A phone, but it has AI and no apps” is a good product, but it could be considered additive.

When the iPhone came out, it was "a pocket computer, but without a physical keyboard and mouse" and some might have argued that it was subtractive because of that. Maybe we shouldn't be thinking about "apps" as something inherently required by any future device ever created.

The additive part on the iPhone was:

1. A screen that covers the whole device.

2. A device that doesn’t suck for touch.

The loss of the physical keyboard was indeed actually a loss, but was offset by meaningful improvements.

My problem with most of these proposed devices is that they are purely subtractive. I can run ChatGPT or Claude or whatever on my phone right now. Where is the part where a new type of device delivers some new experience or capability?

It doesn't sound like your product idea has WhatsApp so it's not going to supplant the phone of anyone I know.

i dont really use any apps on iphone. pretty sure ppl dont want instagram served on chatgpt dynamic ui

God people like you are delusional and don’t understand what drives the behaviour of consumers to even prefer apple and its offerings.

Be careful what you wish for, I can't imagine anything more dystopian than OpenAI owning all our devices.

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