For the last year MCPs were backends without a frontend — dumping text into LLM context and hoping it would show it well to the user. Now MCP Apps are here and they could mean way more for MCPs than it seems at first.
Since ChatGPT we've been putting chatbots into our apps. Now we can put our apps into the chatbots. And if one image is worth a thousand words, good UI/UX can be worth ten thousand — without polluting the LLM context window.
I wrote this as someone building an MCP server (Desktop Commander, ~392K installs by now) who felt the pain of having zero UI control firsthand. Happy to answer questions about what building with MCP Apps is actually like.
