Image: GitHub
Why it mattersA mobile team can let an AI agent drive a real test phone without a Mac. The price is listed and the setup is one URL.
Testing a mobile app with an AI agent used to need a Mac and a phone on the desk. A new cloud service skips both.
Phone Harness published an MCP server on GitHub on 23 October 2026. The repository, phone-harness/mcp, reached 762 stars and 63 forks by 8 November. It is MIT licensed. The README says you can give any MCP agent a real iPhone or an Android emulator in the cloud. You add one URL as a custom connector in a client. The MCP clients named in the README are Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, Codex and VS Code.
What the agent gets
The README lists the actions the agent can perform on the device. The agent can see the screen, tap, type, swipe and open apps. The server registers about 15 tools. They cover device start-up, screenshots, element detection, touch and text input, and app launching. Authentication is OAuth or an API key as a bearer token. The single setup URL is https://mcp.phone-harness.com/mcp.
The phones are not local to the user. The README calls them dedicated cloud iPhones and Android emulators. It says there is nothing to set up, no Mac, no adb and no pairing. The earlier phone-harness project from the same creator needed a Mac on the desk. The MCP server does not.
What it costs
The pricing page at phone-harness.com/pricing lists four tiers. The Android Basic plan is 0 dollars a month with 5 cents per phone-minute and 5 dollars of starter credit. The Android Plus plan is 20 dollars a month. It includes 1,000 phone-minutes and charges 4 cents per minute after that. The Cloud iPhone plan is 64 dollars a month billed annually. The standard monthly price is 80 dollars. The iPhone with eSIM is 80 dollars a month annually or 100 dollars a month standard. The pricing page says the eSIM plan provides a real phone number. A Scale plan for teams that need multiple real phones is quoted on request. These are the company's own figures.
A session on a phone defaults to 30 minutes, set by the minutes parameter on the start-device tool. The page says that number sets session length and is not the billing unit.
What a team can do with it
A mobile product team can let a coding agent open the app and go through a sign-up. The agent can read an SMS one-time code on the eSIM plan and record what it saw. A quality team can keep a regression script running against a real iPhone instead of a simulator. A support team can hand an agent a reported bug and ask it to walk the phone through the steps.
Phone Harness is backed by Y Combinator, according to the company's own site. The MCP server is open-source. The cloud phones and the billing are the paid product. The ChatGPT support carries one limit the README names: custom MCP servers on ChatGPT on the web are available only to Business, Enterprise and Edu workspaces. Pro accounts there see read and fetch tools only.
The question for a mobile team is where real-device testing now sits in the plan. A spare Mac with an iPhone plugged in is one answer. A cloud phone the agent reaches through a URL is another. The prices are published, so the choice can be made on numbers.
Source
phone-harness/mcp on GitHub and the Phone Harness pricing page.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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