sim-use

A tool for operating iPhone, iPad, Android, and simulator screens through an AI agent. It can inspect the screen and perform supported actions such as tapping, swiping, typing, and taking screenshots.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to connect to a simulator, emulator, or supported physical iOS device, read its interface, interact with app controls, and verify the result after each action.
Why use it?
It lets an agent test and operate mobile apps through their visible interface instead of relying only on source code or manual interaction.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/lycorp-jp/sim-use/sim-use
Any agent
npx skills add lycorp-jp/sim-use --skill sim-use
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/lycorp-jp/sim-use

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,032 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00062 $0.03032
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.01516
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00606
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00303

Measured 3d ago against content hash 567eb039f992, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sim-use scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/preflight.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/sim-use/SKILL.md · 173 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 173 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

0. Preflight

Before first interaction with a device, run the preflight check:

python3 scripts/preflight.py --device <UDID>

This verifies sim-use is installed, the device is reachable, and the daemon is healthy. If you don't have the script, do the checks manually:

  1. sim-use --version — confirm sim-use is on PATH.
  2. sim-use devices — confirm the target device is listed and booted/connected.
  3. sim-use ui --device <UDID> — confirm you can read the screen.

--device is optional when only one simulator is booted or one daemon is running. For Android, run sim-use android init --device <serial> once to install the bridge APK. Attached physical iPhones/iPads appear in sim-use devices with kind physical and route through the top-level verbs too — but only ui, selector-based tap and screenshot; every other verb rejects on that target. See Physical iOS devices below before driving one.

1. The observe-act loop

Every interaction follows the same cycle: observe → act → verify.

Observe

sim-use ui --device <UDID>

Read the outline. Each element has an @N alias and optionally a #<id> identifier. List cells carry #N (dominant list) or #N@M (scoped).

Frames in the JSON output (--json: entries[].frame, screen) are in platform-native units — iOS points, Android pixels. Key off the envelope's platform field before doing math on coordinates across platforms. Always pair --json with --no-raw — see Keeping output small below.

Act

Pick a selector, in order of preference:

Selector When to use
tap @N Right after ui. Fastest, cache-backed.
tap #<id> Stable across minor layout changes. Paste from the outline.
tap --label 'X' Scripted flows. Combine with --wait-timeout for transitions.
tap --label-regex '...' Dynamic labels with counters/timestamps. Anchor with ^...$.
tap --label-contains 'X' Substring match when exact label is unknown.
tap -x N -y N / tap --point x,y Last resort for elements with no AX data.

Read the full file on GitHub · 173 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 173 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 567eb039f992

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sim-use is a skill published in the GitHub repository lycorp-jp/sim-use (1,297 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 3,032 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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