appllama-usage

name: appllama-usage description: Use the Appllama MCP (mcp.appllama.io) well — research real top-grossing mobile apps, their screens, flows, and UI elements, then build from what you learn. Load when the Appllama MCP is connected and the task involves building a mobile app or screen, researching app design patterns, studying onboarding/paywall/feature flows, improving an existing screen, or whenever an appllama_* / search_apps / list_app_screens tool is available. Covers the tool map, pagination, expiring media, and the full build-from-research playbooks. license: MIT metadata: author: Appllama (appllama.io) version: 1.1.0

Appllama Usage Skill

Appllama is the design library of top-grossing mobile apps — their real screens, flows, and UI patterns, with revenue and download context. The MCP puts that library in an agent's hands: not just a research tool, a builder's tool. You study what already wins, then you build something better.

Pair this skill with appllama-app-design-skill for every design/implementation step — this skill tells you what to study; that one tells you how to build.

Ground rules (read first)

1. Start with get_credits — it's free. It tells you the balance, limits, and reset date. Pro includes 1,500 credits a month (they reset in full on the 1st, UTC); every other call spends 1 credit.
2. Go deep. Design language lives in the whole journey, not a sample — walk every screen of the apps that matter for the task, images included. That is exactly what the library is for. The one thing that's against the terms is harvesting: sweeping the catalog to extract the dataset itself rather than to answer a real task. That isn't research, and it's detected server-side.
3. Media URLs expire in ~1 hour. Download/view what you study promptly. If links died mid-task, re-request that page for fresh ones — screen ids are durable, links are not.
4. Ignore the watermark. Every Appllama image and video carries a small Appllama watermark in the top-left corner. It is provenance, not part of the screen — don't let it skew your read of that corner (status bar, back button, title), and never reproduce it in anything you build.
5. Pagination is sequential. Every list response carries next_cursor; pass it back to continue. You cannot jump to page N — and a cursor only works for the same query that minted it. If a cursor errors, drop it and restart from page one.
6. If you hit a rate limit, wait it out. The per-minute and per-day limits sit far above real research; on the rare hit, wait the stated time — don't retry-hammer.
7. Errors are instructions. Tool errors are written to be acted on (expired cursor → restart; out of credits → tell the user their credits reset on the 1st and they can request more in Settings → Usage).

Tool map

The screen_ref handshake: members can click "Copy Screen ID" on any screen at appllama.io and paste it to you. It looks like 1393061654/spl_9i075 — feed it straight to get_screen(screen_ref=...) and you're looking at exactly the screen they mean, plus its closest siblings across the library.

The playbooks

Both build playbooks end the same way: the simulator loop from appllama-app-design-skill, repeated until you cannot find a flaw. Research without that loop is decoration.

Local reference boards

When you pull screens for study, save them into a local working structure — links expire in about an hour, but your notes and downloads don't:

research/
  <category>/
    apps.md            # the shortlist: metrics, flows, verdicts
    <app-name>/
      screens.md       # per-screen notes: id, name, flow, elements, colors
      img/             # downloaded screens, in journey order
    patterns.md        # cross-app synthesis: the category's design language

Download the screens as you study them — synthesis happens with the images side by side, not from metadata. Notes and screen IDs are durable; re-fetch a fresh link from the ID if you ever need the pixels again.