ByteDance's Doubao phone assistant said on October 14 that the 30-day public notice period for its Screen Automation Execution Protocol, or SAEP, has ended, and that it will now gradually open screen automation for third-party apps. Under the rules, apps whose developers have not declared a refusal will become available for the assistant's AI agent to operate on users' behalf.
The opt-out does not close with the notice period. Developers can still submit a refusal at any time, and the assistant said it will promptly switch off the related operations once it receives one. Apps that have already declared a refusal will not be operated by the agent.
Alongside the announcement, the assistant published its current list of apps that have refused and said the list will be updated regularly. According to a count by National Business Daily, it covers 151 apps, including 65 apps in the Tencent ecosystem such as WeChat, QQ and Honor of Kings, and 23 apps in the Alibaba ecosystem such as Taobao, Qwen and Alipay. Other apps on the list include those from Kuaishou, Meituan, PDD, Xiaohongshu, Didi, Kimi, DeepSeek, NetEase Cloud Music, Baidu Maps, the three major telecom carriers and several large banks.
SAEP is a declaration protocol for GUI agents, AI systems that operate apps by reading the screen and simulating taps and typing. According to the developer documentation, Android apps can declare which pages and actions an agent may access, at the level of the whole app, a specific page or a specific business intent, such as blocking input on a login page or barring all operation on a payment confirmation screen.
The final decision on each action combines the agent's identity and trust status, a system security baseline, the app's declared policy and the user's authorization. The baseline cannot be relaxed by an app's policy: high-risk actions such as payments, account authentication, publishing content, deletion or permission changes can require the user to confirm, take over or stop the task. Enforcement sits at system control points for screenshots, accessibility access, taps and input, and decisions are logged so that apps can audit what an agent requested and what happened.
In September, the assistant said it would favor structured MCP and A2A connections with apps and fall back to GUI operation where those are not available. SAEP sets the rules for that fallback path.
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