AndroidHarness puts several projects in one phone coding-agent chat

One conversation, more than one codebase

AndroidHarness 2.3 gives a phone-based coding agent access to several projects inside the same chat. A developer can select the projects, make each editable or read-only, and choose a primary workspace for plain paths and new files. The agent’s workspace tools identify which project they target, according to the maintainer’s changelog.

The practical use is cross-project work: consult a library while changing an application, or compare two repositories without opening separate conversations. A public October 14 request described the obstacle in the earlier single-workspace setup. Version 2.3 adds explicit project selection rather than requiring broader full-access mode to reach another project.

There is an important tradeoff. If any selected workspace is read-only, commands, Git and integrations become unavailable for the chat; file tools continue to work. The author says full-access mode does not bypass those checks. Undo and saved changes carry workspace identifiers, and selected workspaces cannot overlap. These are documented permission rules, not an AITrending security audit.

Fixes for older phones and custom gateways

The release also addresses a particularly misleading Android 8 and 9 failure. Issue #43 reports shell commands returning a dynamic-linker banner and a successful exit without doing the requested work. The maintainer attributes this to launching bundled Bash through the system linker and says older Android versions now execute Bash directly, with existing installations regenerating their shim.

Custom provider headers are another addition, useful for gateways that require extra headers. The changelog says their values use encrypted storage, app-managed headers cannot be overridden, and connections with enabled custom headers stop following redirects. A separate fix limits cache-hint fields to documented endpoints instead of sending them to strict gateways that reject unknown fields.

A standalone Android app, with separate model access

AndroidHarness is a native Kotlin/Compose app, not a model or a pi/OpenCode plugin. It supports Android 8.0 and newer, with installation through the project’s Google Play link or a source build requiring JDK 17 and the Android SDK. The GitHub release also includes an APK.

The built-in keyless provider offers anonymous Kilo and Pollinations models with displayed rate limits. Configured cloud providers use their own keys or eligible connected accounts; local GGUF models require a compatible 64-bit device and enough memory. Those local-model and provider options predate 2.3.

Setup requires storage access; the guide specifies All files access on Android 11 and newer for real filesystem paths. Optional Shizuku supplies shell-level privileges without root. Cloud-backed agent requests can send file contents and command output to the selected provider, even though credentials and chat history are stored locally. AITrending read the English release, pinned documentation and public issues, but did not install the app or test the fixes.