OpenAI might be building a phone that kills the app store

Ming-Chi Kuo has a new note out, and this time he’s not talking about Apple. The analyst who’s been right about more iPhone rumors than I can count says OpenAI is working on a phone.

Not just any phone. According to Kuo, OpenAI is partnering with MediaTek and Qualcomm on a custom smartphone chip, with Luxshare handling co-design and manufacturing. That’s a serious hardware stack for a company that’s mostly known for chatbots and image generators.

But the interesting part isn’t the chip. It’s what Kuo says about the software. Instead of a grid of app icons, this phone would rely entirely on AI agents to get things done. No App Store, no Google Play, no gatekeepers telling OpenAI what its software can and can’t do.

That makes sense. Right now, Apple and Google control the pipeline. They decide what system access apps get, which means AI features are always operating within someone else’s sandbox. By building its own phone, OpenAI can give its agents full access to everything — camera, microphone, location, messages, calendar, you name it. No restrictions, no waiting for permission.

This isn’t a new idea. Nothing CEO Carl Pei said at SXSW that apps are going away. Vibe coding app makers have been predicting an agent-first future for a while. But OpenAI actually has the user base to pull it off. ChatGPT is approaching a billion weekly users. That’s a lot of people who already trust the brand enough to hand over their data.

Kuo says the phone would be designed to constantly understand user context. That’s a fancy way of saying it would know what you’re doing, where you are, and what you probably want next — all the time. That level of data collection would make any app-based competitor jealous. An app on someone else’s phone can only see so much. A phone you designed yourself can see everything.

He also mentions a hybrid approach to processing: small models running on-device for quick tasks, cloud models for the heavy lifting. That feels right. You don’t want to wait for a round trip to the cloud every time you ask for the weather, but you also don’t want to run a 70-billion-parameter model on a phone battery.

Timeline wise, Kuo says component suppliers and final specs should be locked in by late 2026 or early 2027, with mass production starting in 2028. That’s a long way off, but it lines up with what OpenAI’s Chris Lehane said earlier this year about announcing a hardware product in the second half of 2026. Most people assumed that would be the earbuds everyone’s been talking about. Maybe the phone is the real product, and the earbuds are just the first piece.

OpenAI didn’t comment on the story. They rarely do. But if Kuo’s track record holds, this is more than just speculation. A phone without apps, powered by agents that know everything about you — that’s either the future or a privacy nightmare. Probably both.