Show HN: NanoMuse – An open-source AI agent for your phone and computer

What it claims

nanoMuse is a GPL-3.0-or-later personal agent. The phone app, desktop app, web console and the relay that connects them all live in one repository. The current version is 0.1.41 "Choice", released 2026-10-07. The project first shipped on 2026-09-25, so it is about two weeks old. A paper is on arXiv (2610.08699, Liu, Liu & Zhang).

How it works

• Phone: each device runs its own agent. The phone agent lives inside the APK and includes Alpine Linux under proot, a shell, a browser and MCP. It is based on OpenMinis 1.13.
• Desktop: nanoMuse Desktop is a plugin of DeepSeek Harness, using a Python runtime for "hands". The desktop operator is a port of ByteDance's UI-TARS-desktop.
• Relay: signed-in devices meet on the relay and can send requests to each other. Only conversation text passes through the relay. Files and screenshots stay on the device that made them.

flowchart LR
  P[Phone agent<br/>proot/Alpine] -- conversation text --> R{Relay}
  D[Desktop agent<br/>DeepSeek Harness plugin] -- conversation text --> R
  R --> C[Community relay<br/>free allowance]
  R --> S[Your own relay<br/>self-host.sh]
  P -. files, screenshots stay local .- P
  D -. files, screenshots stay local .- D

How to use it

• Downloads: all builds come from the latest GitHub release. The same files are mirrored at nanomuse.cn/dl, and there is a browser version to try.
• Sign-in: you need an e-mail address or a mainland-China phone number.
• Model access: signing in gives a free model allowance on the community relay, paid for by the developer. When it runs out, you supply your own API key.
• Deployment options (per docs/self-hosting.md, which estimates "one VPS, one hour"): 1. No server at all, using your own key. 2. Your own relay, via scripts/self-host.sh. 3. Your own runtime for the web app.
• Docs: docs/privacy.md states what the relay keeps. docs/cloud.md, docs/hub.md and docs/every-device.md cover the relay, frames and devices.
• Contributing: AGENTS.md sets the rules for coding agents working in the tree.

Limits

• Licence: GPL-3.0-or-later applies to the whole set, which matters if you plan to embed or redistribute it. The phone app is a modified OpenMinis 1.13 (changes since 2026-09-24). Earlier versions of the Python line were MIT, available under tag pre-openminis. If you need a permissive licence, that older line is the only option, and it predates the current architecture.
• Privacy defaults: the default path sends conversation text through a community relay run by the developer. Read docs/privacy.md, or self-host, before using it with sensitive data.
• Desktop dependency: the desktop agent depends on DeepSeek Harness, since it is a plugin and not a standalone app.
• Maturity: the project is at version 0.1.x and two weeks old. The page reports no benchmarks or evaluation results. It also states it is not affiliated with Meta, which owns the "Muse" trademark.