OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft all back the same standard for running apps inside AI chats.

Booking .com, Figma, and Canva are already using it.

Still, most developers have never heard of it.

It’s called MCP Apps.

So, why does it matter?

The next time someone buys from your website, they may never visit it. They’ll ask ChatGPT or Claude, and the model decides how your product shows up. Usually as plain text, sometimes wrong, with none of the experience you built.

That’s the next shift in how people find you:

• SEO was about Google finding your page.
• AEO was about AI citing you.
• MCP Apps are about your actual product showing up inside the chat.

An MCP server returns data. An MCP App returns data plus an interactive UI, like hotel cards or an add-to-cart flow, right inside the chat. The model even knows what the user clicked.

In this episode, we build an MCP app from start to finish with Julien, the lead maintainer of Skybridge, an open-source framework that lets you turn any React app into an MCP app.

Chapters:

0:00 - Intro 2:44 - MCP servers vs MCP Apps 5:12 - Live demo: Booking .com in ChatGPT 9:24 - How MCP Apps work: context and shared state 15:43 - Skybridge and its devtools 17:48 - Live demo: an e-commerce app in ChatGPT 24:49 - Code walkthrough: MCP tools to React views 28:10 - Syncing UI state: “What’s in my cart?” 32:16 - Agent skill to turn any React app → MCP App 37:52 - Outro

Link to Skybridge GitHub repo: http://github.com/alpic-ai/skybridge…

MCP Apps bring your website into the chat. WebMCP does the reverse and lets AI agents use your website through tools it exposes. I’ve also written a full article on it, quoted below.

alpic-ai/skybridge

Source: https://github.com/alpic-ai/skybridge

Skybridge - the MCP Apps framework

The full-stack React framework for MCP Apps and MCP Servers.

Documentation · Quickstart · Examples

About Skybridge

Skybridge helps developers build type-safe MCP Apps for Claude, ChatGPT and other UI-enabled MCP clients, with a complete set of tooling designed for both humans and agents.

Why? MCP Apps extend the Model Context Protocol with rich, interactive UI views rendered from MCP servers. Conversational apps need seamless interaction between the user, the UI, and the model. This means new UX patterns, developer tooling, and abstractions. Plus, the raw SDKs are low-level: no hooks, type safety, HMR, etc.

That’s why we built Skybridge.

Features include:

• Delightful dev environment: Skybridge provides a dev server with a local emulator, hot module reload, and a permanent tunnel to connect your local app to Claude and ChatGPT.
• Write once, run everywhere: the framework abstracts implementation differences between MCP clients, so your app runs seamlessly in Claude, ChatGPT, VSCode, and any other MCP Apps compatible client.
• Agent-ready: powerful skills, CLI, and programmatic dev tool APIs, everything your coding agent needs to build MCP Apps end-to-end.
• Type-safe end-to-end: tRPC-style inference from MCP server tool definition to React view for type safety from server to frontend.
• React-first: Intuitive React Query-style hooks, with advanced state management.
• Example library: get started quickly with ChatGPT- and Claude-ready app examples for ecommerce, travel, SaaS, and more.

They chose to build their MCP Apps with Skybridge:

Get started

For agents

Install our skill for building MCP Apps and ChatGPT plugins:

npx skills add alpic-ai/skybridge -s skybridge

Once installed, ask your agent “What skills do you have?” to confirm, then try:

• Create a new MCP app
• Migrate my MCP server to the Skybridge framework
• Add a new view to my MCP app

For humans

Bootstrap a new project with:

npm create skybridge@latest my-app

For full install instructions, read our Quickstart guide.

Documentation

The Skybridge documentation covers the full lifecycle of building MCP Apps:

• Fundamentals: understand MCP Apps, ChatGPT plugins, and how Skybridge bridges both runtimes.
• Core concepts: learn about server <> model <> UI data flows, LLM context sync, type safety, and instant local iteration with our devtools.
• Guides: build real app behavior with tools, views, state, and model communication.
• API Reference: browse our MCP server APIs, React hooks, CLI commands, and runtime compatibility.

Deploy

Deploy Skybridge apps instantly on Alpic for scalable hosting, MCP-specific analytics, permanent tunneling, plugin directory compliance auditing and submission help. You can also self-host on any Node.js-compatible platform.

See our deployment guide for the full production path.

Community & Contributing

We’d love your help improving Skybridge. Here are a few ways to get involved:

• Bugs: If you run into a bug or unexpected behavior, open a GitHub Issue with a clear reproduction.
• Questions and ideas: Need help building with Skybridge or have ideas to improve the framework, docs, examples, or developer experience? Open an issue or share them on our Discord.
• Pull requests: For code or documentation changes, read the Contributing Guide before opening a PR.

Skybridge is released under the MIT License.

Contributors

Built and maintained with ❤️ by Harijoe, Fred Barthelet, and the Alpic team.

Example templates

Explore all our example templates in the Examples section of the documentation.

Basic

Preview	App	Description	Demo	Code
	Everything	Comprehensive playground app showcasing all Skybridge hooks and features.	Try Demo	View code

Use cases

Preview	App	Description	Demo	Code
	Capitals Explorer	Interactive world map with geolocation, country information, and dynamic capital exploration.	Try Demo	View code
	Flight Booking	Flight search carousel with route details, pricing comparison, and external booking.	Try Demo	View code
	Ecommerce Carousel	Product carousel with persistent cart, localization, theme switching, and modal dialogs.	Try Demo	View code
	Investigation Game	Multi-screen mystery game with fullscreen mode, dynamic story progression and context asynchronicity demonstration	Try Demo	View code
	Productivity	Interactive analytics dashboard with charts, theme adaptation, localization, fullscreen mode, and bidirectional tool calls.	Try Demo	View code
	Time’s Up	Word-guessing party game where the user gives hints and the AI tries to guess.	Try Demo	View code
	Lumo — Interactive AI Tutor	Adaptive tutor with Mermaid diagrams, mind maps, quizzes, and fill-in-the-blank exercises.	Try Demo	View code

Auth

Preview	Provider	Description	Code
	Descope	Full OAuth authentication with Descope and personalized coffee shop search.	View code
	Clerk	Full OAuth authentication with Clerk and personalized coffee shop search.	View code
	WorkOS AuthKit	Full OAuth authentication with WorkOS AuthKit and personalized coffee shop search.	View code
	Stytch	Full OAuth authentication with Stytch and personalized coffee shop search.	View code
	Auth0	Full OAuth authentication with Auth0 and personalized coffee shop search.	View code
	Authplane	Full OAuth authentication with Authplane and personalized coffee shop search.	View code

UI and component libraries

Preview	App	Description	Demo	Code
	Manifest UI	Agentic component library example for rich AI-powered experiences.	Try Demo	View code
	Generative UI	LLM-generated dynamic UIs with json-render and 36 pre-built shadcn/ui components.	Try Demo	View code
	mcpcn	Agentic component library starter with pre-built mcpcn components and generative UI via json-render.	Try Demo	View code