MCP Apps: Extending the Frontier — Ido Salomon & Liad Yosef
Summary
MCP Apps introduces a standardized protocol for embedding rich, interactive user interfaces directly into AI chat assistants, moving beyond text-only responses. This system allows services (like Shopify or PostHog) to maintain their brand identity and full UX within the agentic loop. By standardizing how tool calls link to rendered web components, MCP Apps ensures that interactions flow back through the host, giving the host control over the user journey. The goal is to enable a 'write once, run anywhere' model for applications across major AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), fundamentally changing how the web is consumed in the era of personal assistants.
Key takeaways
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The Problem with Text-Only Chat
0:24
Textual responses are suboptimal for conveying complex information or maintaining brand identity. Companies want their full UX to be visible and interactive within the chat interface, rather than being reduced to a textual database.
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MCP Apps Protocol
1:46
MCP Apps is an open protocol that allows services to send their UI directly into the chat. This enables not only visualization but also full interactivity, allowing users to act on the displayed content (e.g., favoriting a song).
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Interactive Flow Control
3:30
When a user interacts with an embedded app component (like clicking a button), MCP Apps standardizes this flow by sending a message back to the host, which maintains control and decides whether to execute a tool call on behalf of the user.
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The Agentic Web Vision
10:53
MCP Apps envisions a future where services are broken down into 'atoms' of UI that can be composed by personal assistants, allowing users to complete complex tasks without leaving the chat environment.
Technical details
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Architecture (Resource Consumption)
952s
A tool call made from the host links to a registered resource. This resource contains HTML and is consumed by the host's SDK (e.g., a React or web component). The communication protocol relies on passing this resource plus a callback function, which handles user events back up through the agentic flow.
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Standardized Interaction Flow
210s
Instead of an app sending a message directly to a backend, MCP Apps standardizes the interaction by having the component send an event to the host. The host then decides whether to execute a tool call against the service's server.
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Interoperability and Evolution
The spec is actively evolving through an open working group (including Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.). Key areas of development include 'reusable views' for efficiency and standardizing 'view tools,' which allows the host/chat to initiate actions on the app side.
Mentioned resources
- MCP UI
- MCP Apps Spec
Channel & topics
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