Why Mobster is open source

An agent that drives your iPhone can read your messages and tap Send. Before you let one near your phone, you should be able to read the code that does it. So the whole harness, the part that touches your phone, is open source under MIT: Mobster CLI. You don’t have to take our word for what it does with your screens.

What’s open: the whole harness

Mobster CLI is MIT licensed, copyright Radish Retail, LLC.

Read what touches your phone

The loop that reads the screen, decides and acts is public, and so is every guard in front of an action. Mobster for Mac runs that same engine. To check a claim on this site, open these files:

Getting Mobster past an approval while “Ask before acting” is on, or reaching WebDriverAgent from another machine, counts as a security vulnerability. Report one privately from the repository’s Security tab on GitHub.

Check the privacy claims yourself

Commands go from your agent to your Mac to the phone over the cable. There’s no relay server and no Mobster account. WebDriverAgent listens on the phone’s loopback address, which only USB reaches, and the local API listens on 127.0.0.1 with a token that’s new for each launch. The Mac app has no analytics and no crash reporting.

Screens leave your Mac only when a model needs them: Mobster’s own agent sends each step’s screen text and a small screenshot to the AI provider whose key you gave, under that provider’s terms. An agent you connect over MCP sees what Mobster’s tools return to it. With the harness open, you can check that list against the code. USB or Wi-Fi for iPhone automation walks through the network side.

Build on it

Mobster is meant to sit under other agents. mobster mcp speaks the Model Context Protocol over stdio, and mobster mcp install --all adds it to every MCP client it finds on your Mac, with the absolute path, a backup of each file it edits, and --dry-run to see the diff first. mobster run --json prints one JSON object per event, with the result last. mobster serve is a local HTTP API with server-sent events. MIT lets you read them, change them and ship them inside your own tools.

The CLI is the trial

There’s no free trial of Mobster for Mac, because the CLI already has everything an agent needs. Install it, run mobster --demo with no phone and no key, then connect a simulator or a phone. If you never need the app, you never pay us.

Mobster for Mac is how we pay for the work. It runs the same engine and adds what’s tedious from Terminal: guided setup that builds and signs WebDriverAgent and refreshes a free Apple Account’s 7-day signature, a live view of the phone with manual control, approvals as cards, history of every task with its steps and screens, saved workflows and schedules. It costs $34.99 one time, a lifetime license, or $7.67 a month. The app’s own code is closed; the engine inside it is the open-source CLI, published from the same repository.

What it’s built on

Mobster stands on other open-source projects, and runs them as separate programs:

• WebDriverAgent (BSD-3-Clause), the XCTest runner the Appium project maintains. Mobster pins a release, patches it so it answers over USB only, and builds it with your own Xcode and Apple Account.
• libimobiledevice and libusbmuxd (LGPL-2.1-or-later), whose idevice_id, ideviceinfo and iproxy find the phone and relay its ports over USB.
• ideviceinstaller (GPL-2.0-or-later), run to list the apps installed on the phone.

THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md lists Mobster’s dependencies and their licenses.

Contribute

Bug reports, device reports, fixes, docs and tests are welcome. The test suite needs no phone, simulator or key, and runs on macOS with Python 3.12 or later.

$ git clone https://github.com/RadishSoftware/mobster
$ cd mobster-cli
$ make venv
$ make test-backend

A few of the project’s rules for changes say a lot about it:

• Behavior and docs change together. A change to a command or flag updates the CLI reference with it.
• Safety code stays conservative. Guards, approvals, the journal and the device lock fail closed. A change that makes Mobster act in more situations needs a test that shows where it now acts, and one that shows where it still refuses.
• Speed claims are measured. A change that claims to make Mobster faster says what was measured, on what, and before and after.
• No private data. No keys, journals, screenshots of personal screens, device UDIDs or team IDs in a commit.

Device reports from other phones and iOS versions are especially welcome: include the output of mobster doctor and what worked.

Read the code, then try it

$ curl -fsSL https://mobster.dev/install.sh | sh
$ mobster --demo

Architecture maps the code: one Python package, mobile_agent, that the terminal UI, mobster serve and the Mac app all share.