Doubao Phone Assistant is starting to open up screen automation for third-party apps. On October 14, 2026, its official account announced that the 30-day public notice period for its Screen Automation Execution Protocol (SAEP) had ended, and that screen automation permissions for third-party apps would be opened gradually by risk tier; apps that have explicitly opted out are excluded.
151 apps opted out first, and the biggest ecosystems are nearly all on the list
According to the published opt-out list, 151 apps have declared that they refuse to be operated. Tencent and its affiliates account for 65, including WeChat, QQ and Honor of Kings; Alibaba and its affiliates account for 23, including Taobao, Alipay and Qwen; the list also includes Pinduoduo, Meituan, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, DeepSeek, Kimi and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. In short, the apps people open most often every day have almost all said no first.
What SAEP tries to settle is authorization, not technology
Screen automation means an agent simulates taps and swipes to complete tasks inside other apps on the user's behalf. The technical bar is not high; the real friction is authorization, as app makers worry about risk controls being bypassed and data being read, and cross-app automation of this kind has repeatedly been restricted by leading apps. SAEP lets developers declare for themselves whether to allow, limit or refuse, and to draw the operating boundaries; even after the notice period, developers can submit an opt-out at any time, and Doubao Phone Assistant says it will promptly disable the relevant operations on receipt. The devices currently involved include the nubia M153 and nubia NaviX Ultra.
Once opened, what agents can actually use is mostly the long tail
The weight of this story is not the opening itself but the makeup of the refusal list. A phone agent's value depends on how much it can get done for users, and the entry points for getting things done sit with a handful of super apps; when those apps collectively opt out, agents are left with mid- and long-tail apps, and the experience ceiling drops noticeably. On the other hand, SAEP at least brings the contest into the open: operable by default, refusal by declaration. If more phone makers and agent platforms adopt this rule set, permission negotiations between apps and agents would shift from case-by-case blocking to protocol-based dealing. For users, do not expect an agent to operate WeChat or Taobao for you any time soon; for the industry, this may be the first written cross-app operation protocol of the agent era.
