Most of what we do on our phones still follows the same routine. You open an app, tap through a few screens, and finish the task yourself. Cyclon, a startup from Y Combinator’s F26 batch, wants to hand that whole routine over to AI with a phone it hopes will replace your iPhone.
How is Cyclon different from other AI assistants?
Most assistants rely on developers to build integrations before they can do anything inside an app. Cyclon doesn’t wait for that. It moves through apps the same way you do and can jump between several of them to finish a job.
Say you want to send a friend some photos buried in a WhatsApp chat. You can ask Cyclon to find them and send them over. When the app you need doesn’t exist, Cyclon builds one on the spot, and it keeps working in the background while your phone sits in your pocket.
Can you get your hands on one today?
You can. The first batch of Cyclon phones is a Pixel 8a with Cyclon preinstalled, and the company ships it within 30 days of your preorder. Starting with a Pixel makes sense because Cyclon’s work happens almost entirely at the operating system level.
Custom hardware is still on the roadmap, though. With its own phone, Cyclon plans to run more powerful AI models locally and pair them with cloud models, keeping as much of your personal data on the device as possible.
Will it work reliably with your apps?
That’s the question I keep coming back to. Every app has its own layout and quirks, and an AI that taps through screens has to handle them all. If Cyclon pulls that off, it could save us from a lot of tedious work. If it can’t, it risks becoming another assistant that promises more than it delivers.
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