# Do LLMs Need to See Everything? A Benchmark and Study of Failures in LLM-driven Smartphone Automation using Screentext vs. Screenshots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17817 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17817/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 39 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13657/) (2025)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13771/) (2023)
- [Language Models can Solve Computer Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17491/) (2023)
- [A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12856/) (2023)
- [Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16158/) (2024)
- [Personal LLM Agents: Insights and Survey about the Capability, Efficiency and Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05459/) (2024)
- [MobileLLM: Optimizing Sub-billion Parameter Language Models for On-Device Use Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14905/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Human-in-the-loop for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00941/) (2021)
- [The Illusion of State in State-Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08819/) (2024)
- [You Only Look at Screens: Multimodal Chain-of-Action Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11436/) (2023)
- [AutoDroid: LLM-powered Task Automation in Android](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15272/) (2023)
- [Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03776/) (2020)
- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24024/) (2024)
- [On-Device Language Models: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00088/) (2024)
- [ScreenAgent: A Vision Language Model-driven Computer Control Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07945/) (2024)
- [ScreenAI: A Vision-Language Model for UI and Infographics Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04615/) (2024)
- [Agent-Pro: Learning to Evolve via Policy-Level Reflection and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17574/) (2024)
- [AppAgent v2: Advanced Agent for Flexible Mobile Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11824/) (2024)
- [MobileAgentBench: An Efficient and User-Friendly Benchmark for Mobile LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08184/) (2024)
- [Ferret-UI 2: Mastering Universal User Interface Understanding Across Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18967/) (2024)
- [DroidBot-GPT: GPT-powered UI Automation for Android](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07061/) (2023)
- [AppAgentX: Evolving GUI Agents as Proficient Smartphone Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02268/) (2025)
- [Measuring Agents in Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04123/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), mobile agents have emerged as promising tools for phone automation, simulating human interactions on screens to accomplish complex tasks. However, these agents often suffer from low accuracy, misinterpretation of user instructions, and failure on challenging tasks, with limited prior work examining why and where they fail. To address this, we introduce DailyDroid, a benchmark of 75 tasks in five scenarios across 25 Android apps, spanning three difficulty levels to mimic everyday smartphone use. We evaluate it using text-only and multimodal (text + screenshot) inputs on GPT-4o and o4-mini across 300 trials, revealing comparable performance with multimodal inputs yielding marginally higher success rates. Through in-depth failure analysis, we compile a handbook of common failures. Our findings reveal critical issues in UI accessibility, input modalities, and LLM/app design, offering implications for future mobile agents, applications, and UI development.