phone.md

Your phone has 80 apps. You use 9.

An experiment in what a phone could be instead.

What it is

phone.md is a phone operating system configured by one markdown file. An agent on the device reads that file, changes the phone to match, and edits it as it learns about you. Open it and rewrite it yourself, or just talk to the phone.

Like CLAUDE.md, but for the whole phone.

someone who finds phones overwhelming

phone.md
# My Phone
 
## About Me
I'm Maria, 67. I call my kids and
send photos to the family group.
 
## Notifications
- Only my family and my bank
- Nothing from games or shopping
 
## Security
- Block callers I don't know
- If someone says they're my bank,
  tell me to hang up and call the
  real number
 
## Agent
- Be patient. Explain things simply.
- Make everything big.

someone who wants control

phone.md
# My Phone
 
## About Me
Developer. I know what I'm doing.
 
## Notifications
- Silent. Only ring for calls.
- Wake me for the on-call pager.
 
## Preferences
- Minimal UI, keyboard first
 
## Agent
- Be terse. Skip the pleasantries.
- Don't ask about routine things.

Same hardware, same OS, two different phones. The file is the entire configuration surface. No settings tree, no grid of icons.

Your current phone can already do most of what's in these files. The setting exists. It's five menus deep, filed under a name you would never guess, and it quietly comes undone the next time you change something adjacent to it. Capability was never the problem. Configuration was.

Why you have 80 apps

Most of them are wrappers around hardware you already own. A sound meter is the microphone. A level is the gyroscope. A compass is the magnetometer. A QR scanner is the camera.

Android buries all of it behind APIs only developers reach, so each capability arrives as its own download, with its own permissions, its own ads, and its own reason to keep you in it. More than 62% of them never get opened in a given month. They are still installed, and still holding the permissions you gave them.

An OS that can read its own sensors doesn't need any of them. You ask, it answers. And when you genuinely need something built, you describe it and the phone assembles it from parts it already has, permissions declared up front. Nothing to download. Which also means no route for a fake flashlight app to arrive through.

The experiment

Not a mockup and not a concept video. A phone that boots, makes real calls, and answers when you talk to it.

The phone.md home screen on a Nothing Phone 3, held in one hand. It reads “Good afternoon, Carlos.” above “Say ‘Hey Phone’ or tap below to start.”, with an orange listening circle at the bottom of the screen.
the home screen, on the Nothing Phone 3. 31 July 2026

Most AI phones are an assistant app sitting on top of Android. But an app can't start at boot and refuse to be killed. It can't see every notification, only the handful it gets granted. It can't take the screen without an accessibility prompt, listen for a wake word while the screen is off, replace the home screen, or decide what the device is allowed to talk to.

An app also can't build you software. It can only be software somebody else already built.

So it's a real OS. An AOSP fork, built from source and flashed onto a Nothing Phone 3 that does nothing else.

What runs today

  • romA custom Android 16 build, compiled from source and cold-booting on a Nothing Phone 3.
  • homephone.md is the home screen. A fresh install starts with an empty file and the agent fills it in by talking to you.
  • voiceRealtime speech through the phone's own microphone and speaker.
  • wake“Hey Phone” runs on the device, with the screen off.
  • carrierOutgoing calls, SMS both ways, and LTE/5G data on a real network.
  • notificationsThe agent sees every notification on the phone, and can dismiss or reply to any of them.
  • controlThe agent operates ordinary apps by looking at the screen, and you can interrupt it mid-task.
  • codeIt writes and runs small programs on the phone, so one request can do the work of several steps.
  • sensorsBattery, storage, temperature, screen, SIM, motion, light. The agent reads the hardware directly.

Next in the build: notification rules the phone keeps for you, so Silent. Only ring for calls. is a line you write once and never revisit. Then apps it generates on the fly, so the thing you asked for gets assembled rather than installed. Then models that run on the device, and the security guardian that screens links, calls, and permission requests before they reach you.

Speech and reasoning go to the cloud today, which means what you say to the agent leaves the phone. The phone says so too.

The demo

A demo is coming soon.

The phone doing real things out loud, on the real device.

If you want to see it when it lands, or you want one, email me.

carlos@sevrahq.com