From Tapping to Hopping: Augmenting Mobile GUI Agents with App-Native Deeplinks

Yuchen Sun, Chenglin Cai, Gongjie Zhang, Tianyu Xia, Quyu Kong +6

Mobile GUI agents complete tasks using GUI actions like taps and swipes. These actions are broadly applicable across applications, but reaching a navigation interface. A single deeplink call can replace a sequence of screen-by-screen GUI actions. We therefore introduce hybrid interaction, using deeplinks for direct navigation and GUI actions for other on-screen operations and fallback. To enable this, we discover candidate deeplinks through static analysis, validate them on real devices, and describe their observed landing screens. This process creates a verified and grounded deeplink catalog that pairs each working deeplink with a description of its landing screen. Using this catalog, we introduce GUI-Hopper, a improves task success in commercial applications on real devices, further demonstrating the benefits of hybrid interaction.