Do you need an MCP to build your native app?
Article Summary
Sentry ran 1,350 trials to answer an uncomfortable question: does their newly acquired XcodeBuildMCP tool actually beat a simple markdown file for iOS development?
After acquiring XcodeBuildMCP (a Model Context Protocol server for iOS development), Sentry's engineering team tested three approaches across five coding tasks using three different LLMs. They compared shell commands with no guidance, shell with a simple AGENTS.md file, and their full MCP toolset to see which performs best for AI agents building native apps.
Key Takeaways
- All three approaches hit 99%+ success rates on coding tasks
- Simple AGENTS.md file was 34% faster and 57% cheaper than MCP
- XcodeBuildMCP used 106% more tokens but eliminated build configuration guesswork
- 49-57% of shell trials hit truncation on 1.2MB logs vs 2.1KB filtered MCP output
- XcodeBuildMCP v2 cut token overhead by 35% while maintaining discovery benefits
For simple builds on known projects, a four-line markdown file beats expensive tooling, but MCP's runtime inspection capabilities matter for complex debugging workflows the eval couldn't measure.
About This Article
iOS agents waste a lot of context on failed discovery cycles. Unprimed shell agents averaged 2.56 xcodebuild calls per trial compared to 1.25 for primed runs, because they kept guessing wrong scheme names and simulator destinations before getting it right.
XcodeBuildMCP v2 added stateful session support and shortened tool schema descriptions. This lets the agent remember project configuration and stops it from passing the same parameters across multiple tool calls.
XcodeBuildMCP v2 cut token overhead from 702K to 453K, a 35% reduction, while keeping the 100% task success rate. This makes MCP cost-competitive with primed shell for workflows that need a lot of discovery.
