looktap

For AI agents · iPhone · Android

Hands on the phone.

looktap lets your coding agent see and use the app it's building. It reads the screen as a few lines of text and taps by label, on iPhone and Android devices. No server to start.

npm install -g @looktap/cli

Or without installing: npx @looktap/cli doctor

Read the docsKickstart your agent

~1 KB
per screen read
0.1 s
per tap
0
dependencies

01 · Look

The screen, as text

ls lists what's on screen, one row per element: a ref, its type, where it is, and its label. Hover a row in the terminal to see which element it is.

01 · Look

agent ➜ iPhone 18 Pro simulator

Every command

40 commands, one line of text each

Read from looktap's own code when this page was built. Each one links to the scene above that shows it. The commands reference has every option.

Benchmark

Against Appium, on the same devices

iPhone 14 simulator and Pixel 9a emulator, the same scenario run 10 times, medians. Appium is still faster at reading Android screens; what an agent feels is the size of every answer and the setup before the first one.

Size of one screen read
looktap~1 KB text
Appium41–51 KB XML
Appium MCP101–124 KB XML
Setup before the first command
looktap0.04–0.13 s
Appium7–17 s
Appium MCP23–39 s
Failed operations, of 123 per platform (Android · iOS)
looktap2 · 0
Appium10 · 10
Appium MCP12 · 10
Restart the app (Android · iOS)
looktap186 ms · 513 ms
Appium753 ms · 4.26 s
Appium MCP735 ms · 4.81 s

The full benchmark, including where Appium is still better and how to reproduce it.

Get started

Two minutes to a phone your agent can use

  1. Installnpm install -g @looktap/cli
  2. Check the toolchainlooktap doctor
  3. Teach your agent/plugin install looktap --marketplace lakpriya1s/looktap
  4. Drivelooktap launch com.apple.Preferences --ls

Prefer MCP? Claude Code: claude mcp add looktap -- npx -y @looktap/mcp. Chat apps without a shell (Claude Desktop, Cursor): looktap mcp --config prints a ready-to-paste config.

Node 18+. iOS: macOS with Xcode. Android: adb, with an emulator or a device. Requirements · Quick start · For AI agents

Paste into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, opencode…
Install looktap (https://github.com/lakpriya1s/looktap) so you can drive my app on an iPhone or Android device:

1. Run `npm install -g @looktap/cli`, then `looktap doctor`, and fix anything it reports (boot a simulator or emulator, or connect a device, if none is up).
2. Run `looktap skill --install` and read the skill it installs.
3. Find my app's bundle id / package name in this repo and write a looktap.config.json with it at the repo root.
4. Launch the app with `looktap launch --ls` and tell me what screen it's on.

Rules: never type real credentials, OTPs or card numbers. When the app needs a sign-in, stop and let me do it, then continue from there.

Using Claude Code?

Install the plugin, then let it set everything up: it installs the CLI, checks your toolchain and gets a simulator, emulator or iPhone ready.

/plugin install looktap --marketplace lakpriya1s/looktap
/looktap:setup
What the plugin adds