MCP UI: Extending the frontier — Liad Yosef and Ido Salomon, MCP Apps
May 6, 2026 · 22:21
In this episode, Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef explain MCP Apps, an MCP extension that lets tools send interactive, branded UI instead of plain text responses inside chat hosts like ChatGPT, Claude, VS Code, Cursor, and Copilot. They argue that text-based chat reduces companies to a wall of text, erasing identity, while MCP Apps preserves branding by returning HTML resources that hosts render as secure, interactive components. The architecture ensures every user click sends a message back to the host (not directly to the backend), keeping interactions in context—as demonstrated with a PostHog funnel analysis in Claude. Adoption includes Shopify, Hugging Face, GitHub, ChatGPT, and Claude, with ChatGPT recommending MCP Apps for building ChatGPT Apps. They note 800 million weekly ChatGPT users (10% of world population), calling this a once-in-20-years opportunity to rethink app distribution. Future work covers reusable views, model-UI interaction, and interoperability with generative UI protocols like A2UI and WebMCP, aiming to standardize UI in chat as the new web.
