Beyond the GUI Paradigm: Do Mobile Agents Need the Phone Screen?
Recent advances in mobile agents are dominated by the GUI paradigm, in which agents perceive UI information and emit screen interactions. However, mobile platforms also expose a command-line interface (CLI) that provides direct access to device services and data. We argue CLI deserves first-class consideration alongside GUI. We evaluate three coding agents (Claude Code, Terminus-2, mini-swe-agent) across four model APIs on AndroidWorld and MobileWorld without any mobile-specific post-training, comparing against three reproducible GUI baselines (GUI-Owl-1.5-32B, MAI-UI, Qwen3-VL-32B). Claude Code (Opus 4.7) reaches 71.8\% and 51.9\%, outperforming every reproducible GUI baseline (69.3/68.1...
| Authors | Li Gu, Zihuan Jiang, Linqiang Guo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 16 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 June 2026 |
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