To retire iOS, OpenAI rebuilds Apple

MING-CHI KUO, the analyst who has spent two decades reading Apple's supply chain like sheet music, this week filed a note describing a smartphone that does not yet exist. OpenAI, he reckons, is working with MediaTek and Qualcomm on a custom system-on-chip and with Luxshare on co-design and assembly, with mass production penciled in for 2028. The device, in keeping with the company's stated philosophy, would not run apps. It would run agents.

The framing has been gathering momentum for some time. Carl Pei said at SXSW that smartphone apps would disappear once AI agents could complete tasks on the user's behalf. Replit's Amjad Masad has argued the same in podcast appearances and Y Combinator talks. ChatGPT now has roughly a billion weekly users on consumer surfaces it does not own; phones, browsers, and app stores, every percentage point of that traffic flowing through gates Apple and Google control, with revenue to match. Kuo's note suggests OpenAI is preparing to stop renting that real estate. Most coverage has read the move as a quarrel over the App Store's 30% take, the slow review process, and the various small humiliations that come with being a tenant. That reading is too small.