OpenAI has achieved a remarkable engineering milestone by building and shipping the Sora Android app in only 28 days — a feat made possible largely through its AI coding agent Codex, showcasing how AI can dramatically accelerate software development.
The Sora app — a companion to OpenAI’s popular text-to-video model that lets users turn short prompts into vivid videos — quickly hit #1 on the Google Play Store on launch day, with Android users generating more than 1 million videos within the first 24 hours of release
💡 How OpenAI Did It: Codex at the Center
OpenAI engineers took from October 8 to November 5, 2025 to go from prototype to global launch, relying on Codex — specifically an early GPT-5.1-Codex model — to handle a significant portion of the coding work. This is the same Codex model available today to developers via CLI, IDE extensions, or web interfaces.
The lean development team — reportedly just four engineers — collaborated with Codex to generate much of the codebase, while human developers guided architecture, reviewed AI-generated code, and focused on higher-level design and integration tasks.
According to reports, the AI model consumed around 5 billion tokens during the development process, acting like an experienced engineer that could translate logic and generate code efficiently, especially for cross-platform components and Android-specific features.
📱 From Prototype to Production
Rather than relying on cross-platform frameworks alone, OpenAI’s approach was to use Codex to:
- Translate existing app components into Android-compatible code
- Generate UI elements, API connections, and core logic
- Write unit tests and components for quality assurance
- Enable parallel development streams among engineers with Codex support
This blend of human oversight and AI productivity helped deliver a production-ready app with a reported 99.9 % crash-free rate at launch.
🌐 What Sora Android Brings to Users
The Sora Android app allows users to generate short, high-quality videos from simple text prompts — extending the reach of OpenAI’s text-to-video model onto mobile devices. Users can prompt the model to create dynamic scenes, animations, and engaging visuals on the go, democratizing access to generative video AI.
The rapid development and launch of the Android app help bring this powerful creativity tool to a broader audience beyond web or iOS availability.
🚀 What This Means for Software Development
OpenAI’s 28-day build demonstrates how AI-assisted coding could transform traditional software development timelines:
- Small teams can accomplish in weeks what normally takes months
- AI tools like Codex can handle boilerplate, testing, and even cross-platform conversion
- Human developers can focus on design, architecture, and quality rather than routine coding
This milestone may serve as a blueprint for future projects where AI augments engineering productivity, reshaping how products are built and deployed across platforms.
