Explore MCP App discovery mechanisms

Open
#670 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
typescript
Domain
api

Research direction

Start by reviewing the linked MCP Registry and the discovery mechanisms described for servers, app resources, and tool metadata. Collect concrete host discovery use cases and compare pre-connection metadata with post-connection discovery; done means documented use cases and an aligned direction with adjacent working groups.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement protocol

Problem

MCP Apps discovery is currently underspecified. Servers can expose app resources and tool metadata once connected, but users and hosts generally discover MCP Apps through manual setup, host-specific registries, or product-specific flows. This relates to broader MCP server/connectors discovery questions.

This is a significant hurdle for wide user adoption.

Related areas:

Context

Some hosts already have their own discovery mechanisms for their registries (not necessarily an MCP subregistry). However, it's uncommon, and currently fragmented by design. Whether or not this is an MCP Apps concern remains to be seen.

Questions for the workgroup

  • What should be discoverable: MCP servers, app-providing servers, individual app resources, app capabilities, or all of these?
  • Should Apps discovery be an extension of MCP Registry metadata, a server-declared manifest, host-specific registry metadata, or a combination?
  • Do hosts need structured metadata before connecting to a server, or is post-connection discovery enough?

Desired outcome

Collect concrete discovery use cases and align with adjacent MCP working groups before deciding how to proceed.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
2.9k
Forks
387
Avg merge
3h 21m
Merged PRs (30d)
6

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from modelcontextprotocol/ext-apps

All issues in modelcontextprotocol/ext-apps

Similar issues

More TypeScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.