Hello everyone,
I wanted to use Codex properly on Android without first setting up Termux and then maintaining a separate Node/npm environment. What started as the fairly harmless thought, “This should be possible,” has since turned into AGENTCODI and a surprising amount of work.
The currently released version is 0.4.5 Early Access and runs on ARM64-v8a devices with Android 10 or newer.
AGENTCODI is a standalone Android app for the Codex workflow. It supports authentication through ChatGPT or an OpenAI API key, new and existing Codex threads, live response streaming, and the display of reasoning summaries, plans, commands, file changes, and tool activity.
Approval requests can be accepted or rejected directly inside the app. Available models and reasoning levels are loaded dynamically. There is also a dedicated project workspace from which individual files, generated images, or the entire workspace can be exported as a ZIP archive.
AGENTCODI’s application and test code is written in Java and C++. The interface currently supports English and German and automatically follows the device language.
A surprisingly large part of the development process now consists of finding out how far this kind of workflow can be pushed within Android’s application model. Android occasionally answers that question in its own uniquely charming way.
A good example of this is described in my Developer Diary.
I spent several weeks putting quite a bit of work into keeping Node.js out of future AGENTCODI builds. The idea was to let users install the tools they needed later through the integrated terminal. Since Android 10, however, apps can no longer simply execute downloaded binaries from their writable data directory.
Android took a brief look at my plan and then made the decision itself: Node is coming back.
The required Node.js environment will be bundled directly with future builds. This will make the artifact considerably larger, while keeping the necessary tools available inside the Android sandbox and saving users from having to set up and maintain an additional environment themselves.
This is part of the ongoing development work. The publicly available version 0.4.5 still has no Node.js or npm dependency.
AGENTCODI’s source code is currently closed, and the project does not have an open-source license at this time. To be honest, I am still unsure about this decision. I like the idea of eventually allowing the implementation to be reviewed publicly and giving other developers the opportunity to contribute. At the same time, opening a project of this kind is not exactly a decision you casually make between two commits.
I would be interested to hear how other developers here approach this question.
And if you already use Codex on an Android smartphone or tablet, which parts of the workflow matter most to you there?