OpenAI might be building a phone that kills apps entirely

The rumor mill around OpenAI’s hardware ambitions has been churning for a while now, mostly centered on a pair of earbuds. But a new note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggests something much bigger: a full-blown smartphone.

Kuo, who has a decent track record with Apple predictions, says OpenAI is partnering with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop a custom smartphone chip. Luxshare would handle co-design and manufacturing. That’s a serious hardware stack, not just a side project.

What’s more interesting is what Kuo says about the software. Instead of a traditional app launcher, this phone would rely entirely on AI agents to handle tasks. No App Store, no gatekeepers. That’s a direct jab at Apple and Google, who control app distribution and limit what system access third-party software can get. By building its own hardware and OS stack, OpenAI could let its AI run wild across every feature without asking permission.

This isn’t a fringe idea. The vibe coding crowd has been predicting the death of apps for a while. Nothing CEO Carl Pei said at SXSW that apps will eventually disappear. OpenAI’s phone would be designed to constantly understand user context, feeding the AI more data about daily habits than any single app could ever capture. Kuo says it would use a mix of small on-device models and cloud models to handle different types of requests.

ChatGPT is already nearing a billion weekly users. A dedicated hardware device makes sense if OpenAI wants to lock those users into its ecosystem. But let’s be real: building a phone from scratch is brutally hard. Software, supply chain, carrier negotiations, customer support — it’s a nightmare even for companies with decades of experience.

Kuo expects specifications and component suppliers to be finalized by late 2026 or early 2027, with mass production starting in 2028. That’s a long runway. Earlier this year, OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane said the company’s first hardware product would arrive in the second half of 2026, which lines up with the earbuds rumors. The phone would come later.

OpenAI didn’t comment on this story. But if Kuo is right, we’re looking at a company that doesn’t just want to be an AI provider — it wants to own the entire stack from chip to cloud to user experience. Whether that’s ambitious or delusional depends on how well they execute. I’ve seen too many “iPhone killers” fail to get excited yet.