Three Chinese Phone Makers Just Deleted the Home Screen. Here's What Replaced It.

Pick up most phones and you get the same thing: a grid of icons, waiting for you to tap the right one.

Pick up one of three new phones shown in Shanghai this week, and there's no grid at all. Just a button, or a voice, and something that's supposed to already know what you meant.

This isn't the first time someone's tried to build a phone without apps. It's the first time three serious manufacturers have tried it at once.

Three Phones, One Idea

At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai this week, three Chinese companies each showed a phone built around a single AI agent rather than an app grid:

• ZTE's Nubia brand showed the NaviX Ultra, running ByteDance's Doubao agent, calling it the world's first agentic AI smartphone. No conventional home screen, no traditional app store; a dedicated orange side button or a voice command calls up the agent, which maps a request to a sequence of actions and carries it out.

• StepFun showed the STEPX Neo, running its own operating system built around an in-house agent called Amoo.

• Honor, spun off from Huawei, showed the RobotPhone, built on an agent co-developed with Alibaba using its Qwen model, paired with a mechanical gimbal camera that extends and rotates from the body.

Nubia executives demoed real-time photo editing, map creation, and travel planning at the conference, activated with nothing more than a spoken instruction.

"Many so-called AI phones on the market simply stack AI functions on top of an existing system," said Nubia chief Ni Fei. "That actually makes it more cumbersome for users."

Why This Time Might Be Different

Phones and gadgets built entirely around an AI agent aren't new. They just haven't worked yet.

The Humane AI Pin, a $699 clip-on wearable, launched promising to replace the smartphone screen with natural-language interaction. It shut down, selling its assets to HP for $116 million. The Rabbit R1, a $199 device built on what its maker called a "large action model" designed to navigate apps on a user's behalf, has faced its own well-documented struggles, including reported back-pay disputes with staff.

Both of those products tried to replace the phone entirely. The new Chinese devices take a narrower bet: keep the phone, keep a version of the app layer underneath, but put an agent in front of it as the primary way of getting things done. Nubia's earlier prototype under the same concept, released in December, sold out its initial 30,000-unit batch quickly and doubled in price on the resale market, a small but real signal of demand.

One useful caveat, echoed by industry newsletter AI Weekly: "world's first" is doing a lot of work in this framing, and none of the three companies has disclosed chipset, on-device model size, or how much of the agent runs locally versus in the cloud. The devices have been shown, not independently benchmarked.

The Bigger Reason This Is Happening Now

This isn't happening in a vacuum. China's smartphone shipments have fallen for five consecutive quarters, as a global memory-chip shortage pushed component costs up and consumer demand down. IDC expects the global smartphone market to post its steepest annual decline on record in 2026.

Against that backdrop, IDC expects AI smartphones to account for more than half of China's market this year. For manufacturers competing on thin margins, an agent that can genuinely save someone time is a more durable selling point than another camera bump or screen-refresh-rate bump.

Apple and Samsung are approaching the same moment differently, at least for now. Samsung's Galaxy AI and Apple's Apple Intelligence add features, like proactive suggestions, live translation, or writing tools, on top of the existing app-based interface, rather than replacing it with a single agent layer. Apple has also recently secured regulatory approval to bring Apple Intelligence to China through partnerships with Alibaba and Baidu, putting it in more direct competition with the same ecosystem powering these new agentic devices.

AI Phones: FAQ

Jans Bock-Schroeder

Publisher & Founder of AI Angst

Coming from the world of art, photography, and the luxury market, Jans launched AI Angst in 2025 to explore the cultural, ethical, and psychological impacts of artificial intelligence. His work bridges creative vision with critical technology analysis, offering clarity in an era of rapid technological change.