OpenAI might be making a phone that kills the app store

Ming-Chi Kuo dropped another hardware prediction today, and this one is a doozy. The analyst, who has a solid track record with Apple leaks, claims OpenAI is working on a smartphone with MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Luxshare. Not earbuds anymore — a full-blown phone.

Kuo’s note says OpenAI would co-develop the chip with MediaTek and Qualcomm, while Luxshare handles co-design and manufacturing. That’s a serious hardware partnership, not a half-baked experiment.

But the interesting part isn’t the chip. It’s what Kuo says about the software: no apps. Instead, the phone would rely entirely on AI agents to do everything. You don’t open Uber, you tell the phone you need a ride. You don’t scroll Spotify, you ask for music. That’s the pitch.

This makes sense when you think about OpenAI’s current frustration. Right now, Apple and Google control what apps can do, how much system access they get, and what data they can touch. OpenAI’s ChatGPT app on an iPhone is still just an app — it can’t deeply integrate with your texts, your calendar, your camera, your location history the way a native OS agent could. Building their own phone lets them bypass those restrictions entirely.

And with ChatGPT pushing a billion weekly users, OpenAI has the audience to make this work. A billion people already trust the brand enough to use it regularly. That’s a bigger installed base than any phone maker outside Apple and Samsung.

Kuo also says the phone would be designed to continuously understand your context — where you are, what you’re doing, who you’re talking to — and use that to anticipate what you need. That kind of always-on awareness requires deep system-level access that no third-party app can get today. It also means OpenAI gets way more data about user habits than it ever could through an app on someone else’s phone.

To handle all that processing, Kuo expects a mix of small on-device models for quick, private tasks and cloud models for heavier lifting. That’s the same hybrid approach Apple is reportedly taking with its own AI push, so the industry is clearly converging on this architecture.

Of course, this isn’t just OpenAI’s idea. Vibe coding app makers have been predicting an app-less future for a while. Nothing CEO Carl Pei said at SXSW that apps will eventually go away. The logic is simple: if an AI agent can do what an app does, why do you need the app? The app store is a distribution bottleneck that Apple and Google control completely. OpenAI wants to own the entire stack, from silicon to user experience.

Kuo says the specs and component suppliers should be locked down by late 2026 or early 2027, with mass production starting in 2028. That’s a long timeline. Hardware is hard, and building a phone from scratch is harder than making earbuds. But OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane said earlier this year that the company’s first hardware product would launch in the second half of 2026. That was widely assumed to be the earbuds. Maybe the phone comes later, or maybe the earbuds and phone are part of the same ecosystem play.

Either way, the idea of an AI-native phone without apps is ambitious. It’s also risky. People are used to app stores, used to choosing their own apps, used to the walled gardens they already know. Convincing them to switch to a phone that does everything through a chat interface is a tough sell. But if anyone has the brand trust and technical chops to try, it’s OpenAI.

I just hope they nail the on-device privacy story. A phone that constantly watches you is a privacy nightmare if not done right. Apple has spent years marketing privacy as a feature. OpenAI would need to match that trust, or nobody will buy this thing.