OpenAI might be building a phone that kills apps entirely

Another day, another OpenAI hardware rumor. This time it’s not earbuds — it’s a full-blown phone.

Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo — the same person who’s been right about Apple’s hardware plans more often than not — published a note claiming OpenAI is teaming up with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop a custom smartphone chip. Luxshare, known for assembling iPhones and AirPods, would handle co-design and manufacturing.

The interesting part isn’t the chip, though. It’s the software approach.

Kuo says the phone would ditch apps entirely. Instead of tapping icons for Uber, Spotify, or your calendar, you’d just talk to an AI agent that handles everything. No app store, no walled garden, no gatekeepers like Apple or Google controlling what the AI can access.

That last bit is the real motivation here. Right now, even if ChatGPT runs as an app on your phone, it’s still limited by what iOS or Android allow. System-level access — things like reading your screen, controlling Bluetooth, or managing files — is tightly restricted. Build your own phone with your own OS, and suddenly those restrictions disappear.

This isn’t just OpenAI’s fantasy. The “apps are dead” narrative has been floating around for a while. Nothing CEO Carl Pei said at SXSW that apps will eventually go away. Vibe coding app makers are already predicting a future where you don’t install anything — you just ask.

Kuo also mentions that OpenAI’s phone would be designed to continuously understand user context — meaning it would learn your habits, preferences, and routines over time. That requires a lot of data, way more than what an app on someone else’s phone can collect. By owning the hardware, OpenAI gets direct access to that data stream.

On the technical side, the device would use a mix of small on-device models for quick, local tasks and cloud models for heavier lifting. That’s the same hybrid approach we’re seeing from Apple Intelligence and Google’s on-device Gemini, so nothing revolutionary there.

Timeline-wise, Kuo expects component suppliers to be finalized by end of 2026 or early 2027, with mass production starting in 2028. That’s a long way off. Earlier this year, OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane said the company’s first hardware product — likely those rumored earbuds — would be announced in the second half of 2026.

So we might see earbuds first, then a phone a couple years later. Or the phone might never ship. Hardware is hard, and OpenAI has zero experience making a phone from scratch.

But the ambition is clear: if you control the hardware, the OS, and the AI, there’s no one to ask for permission. That’s a bet worth watching.

OpenAI didn’t comment on the story at the time of writing.