Open Minis Is the iOS Agent I Wish Siri AI Could Be - MacStories

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Open Minis for iOS.

Every once in a while, I come across a third-party app that either resets my expectations for a particular niche of software on iOS or creates an entirely new category altogether. I’ve had quite a few of these moments in the 17 years I’ve been writing app reviews at MacStories: Editorial, Workflow, Obsidian, Sky, and, most recently, OpenClaw come to mind. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had another such moment with Open Minis, a new chatbot app for iPhone and iPad that I can best describe as getting a preview of Siri AI’s agentic future, today .

Open Minis is an on-device agent that lets you use any frontier model for conversations, with a twist: unlike other AI wrappers, this app deeply integrates with all sorts of native Apple system frameworks using official APIs available to third-party developers. Open Minis can control Reminders and Music, which we have seen before, but also Calendar, Maps, HomeKit, HealthKit, and Files; it can even work with frameworks such as Vision for OCR, Apple NLP for natural language processing, the iOS clipboard, speech recognition and dictation, NFC, and Bluetooth. Furthermore, Open Minis comes with its own configurable workspace in the Files app, has an on-device memory system, and features browser-use capabilities via a (once again, native for iOS developers) built-in WebKit web view.

Effectively, Open Minis is what would happen if you rolled Claude Code and OpenClaw into one intuitive agentic experience designed for Apple users, with a powerful tool-calling harness that can improve and tweak itself, and with integrations specifically designed for the Apple ecosystem. It is the most impressive indie app I’ve seen in a while. If you were disappointed by the lack of power-user capabilities in Siri AI, this is a real, currently shipping example of what Siri AI could be if only it were powered by a frontier model with truly agentic functionalities.

The iOS CLI

The trick hidden up Open Minis’ sleeve is as ingenious as it is obvious: all the Apple framework integrations it supports are powered by command-line interfaces (CLIs) that bridge native Apple APIs (EventKit, MusicKit, HomeKit, etc.) to a code environment that modern LLMs can understand and operate with. To make all of this work behind the scenes, the developer of Open Minis had to create dedicated CLIs for each of these frameworks, which – and here comes the other trick – are driven by a model harness that has access to a built-in Linux terminal and is sandboxed to the app’s workspace.

Specifically, Open Minis runs a version of iSH, a popular Alpine Linux shell that operates a persistent, emulated Linux environment for ARM64 architecture in a sandboxed fashion. The shell inside Open Minis can download external packages from the web using Alpine’s apk package manager (which means that you can access popular tools such as ffmpeg and yt-dlp directly from the app), has its own Linux filesystem (exposed in the Files app as a native file provider location), and is able to call bridged Apple CLIs, as well as any kind of MCP server (via MCP code execution, another trend in the AI industry these days). Think about it this way: if Claude Code or Codex on the Mac can do anything across the entire filesystem by virtue of running in the Terminal app, Open Minis can do (almost) anything within its app sandbox thanks to a built-in terminal emulator – including running Python, using Git and SSH, and accessing standard Unix text utilities.

Minis’ built-in shell (left) and dedicated workspace in the Files app (right).

However, this doesn’t mean that, when using Open Minis, you’ll be looking at a terminal UI all the time: the underlying shell is simply what makes all of this possible behind the scenes. The app can display a picture-in-picture terminal preview that you can open to preview what it’s doing, but you don’t have to. The app’s main interface is your classic, chatbot-style UI that, depending on the model you’re using, will display interleaved thinking blocks, tool calls, and messages in a conversation transcript.

The regular chatbot UI of the Minis app.

The other hidden power of Open Minis (which is reminiscent of OpenClaw, or, perhaps more aptly, a self-improving system such as Hermes Agent) is that it can inspect and modify its own workspace via dedicated Minis CLIs. For example, you can ask Minis – in natural language, of course – to add a new model or MCP server, and the app will bring up a native settings screen and ask for permissions to do so. If you want to store a password or...