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

Mobile GUI agents complete tasks using GUI actions like taps and swipes. These actions are broadly applicable across applications, but reaching a task-relevant screen can require many intermediate navigation steps, lengthening trajectories and creating more opportunities for error. Fortunately, many Android applications expose deeplinks—external entry points to specific in-app screens—that provide a higher-level 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 deeplink-augmented GUI agent that learns when to use a deeplink and when to rely on GUI actions. On MobileWorld, GUI-Hopper achieves higher task success with fewer steps than its GUI-only counterpart; its gains persist even without deeplinks at inference. On MobileWorld-Real, it also improves task success in commercial applications on real devices, further demonstrating the benefits of hybrid interaction.