In Claude Code, does appium-mcp support starting a separate Appium server for each sub-agent without interfering with each other? If supported, how do you set it up?

[renmiantaohua123]

I'm currently facing an issue where Claude Code spawns multiple sub-agents, and each sub-agent starts its own stdio-based appium-mcp process. However, it seems that all these appium-mcp instances are sharing a single Appium server. How should this be resolved?

[KazuCocoa]

Could you share the all logs?
I haven't run the case, but based on the description, your local had different subprocess of appium-mcp. Then, they might have port conflict addressed in https://github.com/appium/appium-uiautomator2-driver#parallel-tests (similar one exist in the xcuitest driver as well)

[renmiantaohua123]

Could you share the all logs? I haven't run the case, but based on the description, your local had different subprocess of appium-mcp. Then, they might have port conflict addressed in https://github.com/appium/appium-uiautomator2-driver#parallel-tests (similar one exist in the xcuitest driver as well)

Thanks for the quick reply!

We have two follow-up questions based on our observation:

1. Process sharing behavior

We observed that when 3 sub-agents of the same type share an identical inline mcpServers definition in Claude Code, only 1 appium-mcp process was spawned (not 3 separate ones). It seems Claude Code reuses the same MCP process for sub-agents with identical MCP
server configurations.

Could you clarify: is appium-mcp designed to handle multiple concurrent sessions within a single process, or does it assume each instance runs as a separate isolated process?

2. Automatic port assignment

If multiple sessions run within a single process (or even across separate processes), they all default to the same systemPort (8200) and mjpegServerPort (7810), which causes conflicts.

Is there a plan to support automatic unique port assignment per session inside appium-mcp, so users don't need to manually pass systemPort and mjpegServerPort in capabilities for each parallel session?

[KazuCocoa]

is appium-mcp designed to handle multiple concurrent sessions within a single process, or does it assume each instance runs as a separate isolated process?

Appium-mcp can handle multiple sessions today, but to run them in parallel, you may need to explicitly give the target session ID for each action. The appium-mcp instance takes the active one session by default.
e.g. https://github.com/appium/appium-mcp/blob/main/src/session-store.ts#L130-L136

automatic unique port assignment

As systemPort's description, it usually scan a specific port range by default but how it worked depends on the situation.
https://github.com/appium/appium-uiautomator2-driver#driverserver

By default the first free port from 8200..8299 range is selected.

Thus, it is appreciated to share the entire appium-mcp server logs to understand the behavior.

[saikrishna321]

@renmiantaohua123

https://github.com/AppiumTestDistribution/AppClaw/blob/4f9fc3d7b4d4a9c3d752cca7a9b563511affd18a/src/flow/parallel-runner.ts#L4

Could you clarify: is appium-mcp designed to handle multiple concurrent sessions within a single process, or does it assume each instance runs as a separate isolated process?

Appclaw Mobile Agent works on appium-mcp, the projects uses single instance of appium-mcp to trigger multiple parallel sessions. Appclaw manages the required ports as @KazuCocoa mentioned above.

Is there a plan to support automatic unique port assignment per session inside appium-mcp, so users don't need to manually pass systemPort and mjpegServerPort in capabilities for each parallel session?

So far we don't have this in our pipeline to add this support.