Open Minis is a free, open-source AI agent for iOS and Android that does more than chat — it gives the model a real computer to work with. A sandboxed Alpine Linux shell runs on your device: it installs packages, runs Python, edits real files and drives a browser. Around it, 30+ native bridges reach HealthKit, HomeKit, Calendar, Photos. etc. Bring your own model — Claude, GPT, Gemini, Kimi, Grok, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Keys and data never leave your phone. Free and Open Source.
Hi Product Hunt 👋
I built Open Minis because every “AI assistant” on my phone could talk about my data but never actually touch it. The apps that could act were locked to one vendor’s model and one company’s cloud.
So Minis takes the opposite bet. The agent gets a real Alpine Linux sandbox running on the iPhone itself — an ARM64 fork of iSH on iOS, PRoot on Android. It has a filesystem, a package manager, Python, git, ffmpeg. On top of that, 30+ native offloads expose Apple frameworks as ordinary command-line tools, so the model reaches HealthKit or HomeKit the same way it reaches ls. Turns out models are very good at CLIs.
Three principles:
Local-first. Your keys and data stay on-device. No account, no telemetry, no server of mine in the path.
Bring your own model. Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Kimi, Grok, OpenRouter, or anything OpenAI-compatible.
Open Source, all of it, iOS and Android.
It’s free with no IAP. I’d genuinely love to hear where it breaks for you — the roadmap is mostly built out of issues people file.
the cli bet is the interesting part and i think it is right, models are genuinely good at command lines. what it costs you is that a command line does not tell the model what a command costs.
ls and rm are the same shape until you read the name. a health read and a home unlock are both just tools in a namespace. so the surface encodes capability and not effect, and effect is what you would actually want to gate on: does this read, does this write, does it move something in the physical world.
gal's question above is about reach. mine is about what happens after it reaches. no server in the path removes the leak risk and it also removes the log. if it does something dumb at 2am there is no server side record to reconstruct what it ran, and that is the half of no telemetry that never makes the slide.
are the 30+ offloads classified by effect anywhere, or is it one flat namespace where reading step counts and unlocking a door look identical to the model?
Local-first is doing some heavy lifting on this page. Keys and files stay on the phone, but the second the agent reads HealthKit and drops it into a prompt, that data is sitting on someone's inference server, and it's whichever provider the user picked rather than one you can vouch for. That's still a better story than every cloud wrapper, it just isn't no server in the path, and the people who care about that distinction are exactly who you're selling to. I'd say it plainly on the page: on-device execution, remote reasoning.
Giving the agent a real local shell instead of another chat layer is a great direction. Python, git, ffmpeg, and the native bridges make it feel genuinely useful on a phone, not just impressive in a demo. How do you handle permissions and approval when a task touches sensitive areas like HealthKit, Photos, or HomeKit?
About Open Minis on Product Hunt
“An on-device AI Agent that runs on your phone, open & secure”
Open Minis launched on Product Hunt on August 3rd, 2026 and earned 92 upvotes and 5 comments, placing #21 on the daily leaderboard. Open Minis is a free, open-source AI agent for iOS and Android that does more than chat — it gives the model a real computer to work with. A sandboxed Alpine Linux shell runs on your device: it installs packages, runs Python, edits real files and drives a browser. Around it, 30+ native bridges reach HealthKit, HomeKit, Calendar, Photos. etc. Bring your own model — Claude, GPT, Gemini, Kimi, Grok, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Keys and data never leave your phone. Free and Open Source.
Open Minis was featured in Productivity (657.5k followers) and GitHub (41.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 176.7k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Open Minis?
Open Minis was hunted by Wang Ethan. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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