Is the iPhone version of Doubao Mobile Assistant coming? Pelican lets AI keep working on the lock screen.

Beating AI News Flash: Developer Finn Voorhees has unveiled Pelican, an iPhone AI Agent app, and has begun inviting a small number of users to test it via TestFlight, with plans for an official launch in the near future. It supports MCP, browser operations, maps, and other tools, and can connect to AI models from different vendors. According to Finn, the Agent executes tasks directly on the iPhone, and even if you switch apps or lock the screen, it can continue working, without the need to prepare an extra Mac mini.

A few days ago, Finn had just demonstrated using Pi Agent and Claude Opus 5.5 to operate an iPhone, automatically opening Ryanair to check flight tickets, all without any computer involved. He had also previously open-sourced PiDurableKit, which uses Apple's JavaScriptCore to run Pi Agent on the iPhone and saves task state via SQLite, so that even if interrupted by the system, it can resume execution after running resumes. The chat app PiChat, developed based on this framework, also leverages Apple's background task mechanism to let the Agent continue working after switching to other apps.

When someone asked whether Pelican runs entirely locally, Finn replied that aside from model API requests, everything else is completed on the phone. He also plans to introduce local small models so that the Agent does not need to upload some private data to the cloud when processing it.

Pelican is still in an early testing phase, and Finn has not yet confirmed whether it integrates the cross-app tapping capability demonstrated earlier.