First and foremost: you don't need a machine to SSH into. When I'm on vacation, I can't count on my home server being up 24/7.
Secondly, yeah, Android / general interactivity features: it has a surface to propose edits/diffs, open dialogs, and show you rendered files, not just markdown in vim. Also: you take a picture and ask it to do something with it > it does. You ask it to put a route into google maps > it opens maps with the whole route placed properly.
And the killer: you can point it at a running browser with remote debugging enabled, and it can surf the internet on your behalf while you're sleeping. In general it can automate any interaction (via self-adb) if needed.
And my favourite: building and deploying android apps from android itself. Harness itself was built on the phone it runs on, and it works like a charm.
As a bonus: I've run this and a local Qwen as the model (hosted on my desktop's RTX 3090) — everything can be encapsulated in a true local-first environment.
What is the main benefit of running the agent directly on the phone instead of Termux + SSH?
Is access to some android features or other benefits?
First and foremost: you don't need a machine to SSH into. When I'm on vacation, I can't count on my home server being up 24/7.
Secondly, yeah, Android / general interactivity features: it has a surface to propose edits/diffs, open dialogs, and show you rendered files, not just markdown in vim. Also: you take a picture and ask it to do something with it > it does. You ask it to put a route into google maps > it opens maps with the whole route placed properly.
And the killer: you can point it at a running browser with remote debugging enabled, and it can surf the internet on your behalf while you're sleeping. In general it can automate any interaction (via self-adb) if needed.
And my favourite: building and deploying android apps from android itself. Harness itself was built on the phone it runs on, and it works like a charm.
As a bonus: I've run this and a local Qwen as the model (hosted on my desktop's RTX 3090) — everything can be encapsulated in a true local-first environment.