July 1, 2026
AI art, but make it messy
Generating Images with a 2025 Android
Android fans cheer the phone-made art, then roast how absurdly hard it was
TLDR: A Samsung Galaxy S25+ was made to generate images on-device, which is a big deal because it shows phones can do more AI work without the cloud. Commenters were split between being impressed and laughing that Android made the process feel wildly complicated compared with Apple.
A team managed to make a Samsung Galaxy S25+ create full images on the phone itself, and the internet instantly turned it into a cage match about who really wins: Android, Apple, or absolutely nobody trying to build this stuff. The basic feat is impressive — they got a 2025 Android handset to produce 512×512 pictures like whales, jellyfish, cabins, and a moody sailor, using the phone’s built-in AI hardware instead of sending the job to the cloud. But the comments were way less interested in the pretty bonsai tree than in the pain it took to get there.
The loudest reaction was basically: “Cool demo, nightmare platform.” Readers piled on the fact that a five-years-older iPhone apparently did the same kind of task more smoothly, with many joking that Android’s true operating system is “adapters, cables, and vibes.” Others pushed back hard, saying this is exactly why Android tinkering is fun: messy, open-ended, and full of weird hacks. That sparked the classic comments-section civil war — “Apple is polished but locked down” versus “Android gives you freedom to suffer.”
The funniest jokes wrote themselves. People mocked the idea of a “phone app” that has to be triggered from a computer over a cable, calling it the most Android sentence ever. The failed attempt to get the graphics chip to stop crashing also inspired meme energy: one camp called the red apple test image a heroic breakthrough, while another said the phone basically said, “Best I can do is fruit.” Even the praise came with side-eye: yes, it works, but the real community verdict was that the image generator may be on the phone — the drama is definitely in the comments.
Key Points
- •The article demonstrates 512×512 image generation on a Samsung Galaxy S25+ using PrismML’s Bonsai Image model running on the phone’s Hexagon NPU.
- •The Android project is presented as a follow-up to an earlier 2020 iPhone implementation using the same model and image size.
- •The CPU baseline using stable-diffusion.cpp on the S25+ took about two minutes per diffusion step and roughly eight to nine minutes for a full 512×512 image.
- •A GPU path produced a 256×256 image via OpenCL, but repeated crashes during denoising prevented stable 512×512 generation.
- •The final Android setup was not a fully standalone app; instead, the generation pipeline was loaded onto the phone and triggered from a computer over a cable after overcoming NPU-related issues such as weight expansion, fp16 overflows, and Qualcomm SDK quirks.