# PhoneWorld: From Real-App Trajectories to Dynamic and Verifiable Environments for Phone-Use Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29486 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29486/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (2024)
- [AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13771/) (2023)
- [Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16158/) (2024)
- [GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10458/) (2025)
- [UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02544/) (2025)
- [On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03679/) (2024)
- [OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09123/) (2025)
- [Mobile-Agent-E: Self-Evolving Mobile Assistant for Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11733/) (2025)
- [AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24024/) (2024)
- [UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10833/) (2025)
- [MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22047/) (2025)
- [Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16855/) (2026)
- [MobileWorld: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents in Agent-User Interactive and MCP-Augmented Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19432/) (2025)
- [Agent World Model: Infinity Synthetic Environments for Agentic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10090/) (2026)
- [Mobile-Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-based Mobile Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00993/) (2024)
- [MobileGUI-RL: Advancing Mobile GUI Agent through Reinforcement Learning in Online Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05720/) (2025)
- [EnvGen: Generating and Adapting Environments via LLMs for Training Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12014/) (2024)
- [MobileRL: Online Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Mobile GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18119/) (2025)
- [TongUI: Internet-Scale Trajectories from Multimodal Web Tutorials for Generalized GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12679/) (2025)
- [UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09082/) (2026)
- [InfiniteWeb: Scalable Web Environment Synthesis for GUI Agent Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04126/) (2026)
- [VideoAgentTrek: Computer Use Pretraining from Unlabeled Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19488/) (2025)
- [AutoWebWorld: Synthesizing Infinite Verifiable Web Environments via Finite State Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14296/) (2026)
- [A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents with Essential-State Procedural Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01149/) (2025)
- [GUI-GENESIS: Automated Synthesis of Efficient Environments with Verifiable Rewards for GUI Agent Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14093/) (2026)
- [MobileSteward: Integrating Multiple App-Oriented Agents with Self-Evolution to Automate Cross-App Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16796/) (2025)
- [Mobile-Bench-v2: A More Realistic and Comprehensive Benchmark for VLM-based Mobile Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11891/) (2025)
- [STEP: Success-Rate-Aware Trajectory-Efficient Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13091/) (2025)
- [AndroidDaily: A Verifiable Benchmark for Mobile GUI Agents on Real-World Closed-Source Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27761/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [AppDeltaWorld: Transition-Grounded Delta Code World Model for Mobile GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05891/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real applications provide the training setting closest to phone-agent deployment, but are difficult to reset, scale safely, and verify programmatically. Static screenshots and interaction trajectories preserve realistic evidence but cannot generate new experience. We introduce PhoneWorld, a trace-grounded framework that converts such evidence into runnable, resettable, and verifiable Android environments. PhoneWorld induces a usage-weighted interaction skeleton from observed pages, transitions, and state-changing operations; translates it into a behavior-grounded app specification; realizes the specification through an autonomous build--inspect--repair loop; and synthesizes executable tasks with programmatic verifiers. The resulting suite spans 34 consumer-facing apps across 16 domains and supports an audited online benchmark, verified trajectory generation, and online RL through common reset and verification interfaces. Evaluations with diverse general and open-source GUI agents show that PhoneWorld supports reliable end-to-end online interaction and exposes capabilities complementary to AndroidWorld. Controlled SFT experiments further show that PhoneWorld trajectories complement AndroidWorld supervision, transfer across online and offline benchmarks, and become more effective as data volume and app coverage increase. Under a matched RL budget, combining PhoneWorld mock-app rollouts with real-app rollouts improves performance over real-app RL alone on both real-phone tasks and AndroidWorld. Together, these results demonstrate that trace-grounded executable abstraction can bridge realistic mobile behavior and scalable agent learning, turning limited real-app evidence into a growing supply of controllable and verifiable environments for training and evaluation.
