someone let their phone's AI install its own software. it actually worked — with a catch

An Android app called RikkaHub Agent turns a phone into a local-LLM-powered agent that can write code, run Linux commands, and compile software on… Aliteq Priya Nair · Software & Systems Editor

RikkaHub Agent is a free, open-source fork of the RikkaHub Android chat client that adds an agentic layer with more than 80 device-control tools.

In XDA's test it ran on an Oppo Find N5 (Snapdragon 8 Elite, 16GB RAM), with the language model running two different ways: locally in Termux, and remotely on a separate PC over the network.

Asked to set up whisper.cpp, the agent checked what was missing, asked permission, then installed dependencies, cloned the repo, compiled it in about 7 minutes, and downloaded a 75MB speech model —…

A 27B model (Qwen 3.6, Q4_K_M quantization) running remotely on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX generated 40-50 tokens per second answering the phone's requests.

A model running entirely on the phone itself managed roughly 7-8 tokens per second — usable for chat, but described as 'incredibly slow' for anything beyond simple tool calls.

Every install in XDA's test needed an explicit yes first — that's a deliberate design choice in this specific app, not a law of nature for agentic AI. We've already seen what happens when that…

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