ByteDance's Doubao phone assistant announced on October 14 that the 30-day public notification period for the Screen Automation Execution Protocol (SAEP) has ended, and it will now gradually provide screen automation features for third-party applications.
According to the established rules, applications whose developers have not declared an opt-out will become available for the AI assistant agent to operate on behalf of users. It is important to note that the notification period does not imply a final refusal; developers can apply for an opt-out at any time, and the assistant will promptly disable the relevant operations upon receiving such a request. Applications that have already declared their disagreement will not be managed by the agent.
Along with this announcement, the assistant published an updated list of opting-out applications and stated that this list will be regularly updated. According to National Business Daily, the list includes 151 applications, including 65 from the Tencent ecosystem, such as WeChat, QQ, and Honor of Kings, as well as 23 applications from the Alibaba ecosystem, such as Taobao, Qwen, and Alipay. Other applications on the list include services from Kuaishou, Meituan, PDD, Xiaohongshu, Didi, Kimi, DeepSeek, NetEase Cloud Music, Baidu Maps, three major telecommunication operators, and a number of large banks.
SAEP is a declaration protocol for GUI agents—AI systems that control applications by reading the screen and simulating taps and text input. According to developer documentation, Android applications can specify which pages and actions the agent has access to: this can be the entire application level, a specific page, or a particular business intent, such as blocking input on a login page or prohibiting all operations on a payment confirmation screen.
The final decision for each action is based on the agent's identification and trust status, the system's baseline security level, the application's declared policy, and user authorization. The application policy cannot weaken this baseline level: high-risk actions, such as payments, account authentication, content publishing, deletion, or permission changes, may require user confirmation, acceptance, or task stoppage. Control implementation is carried out at system points for screenshots, accessibility access, taps, and input, and all decisions are logged for auditing by the applications so they can verify what requests the agent made and what happened.
In September, the assistant announced the priority of structured MCP and A2A connections with applications, followed by transitioning to GUI operation in cases where such connections are unavailable. SAEP establishes the rules for this fallback path.
