Docs / Release notes

Tomacco 1.3.0#

Tomacco: Give your agent a phone. It builds, runs and tests Android and iOS apps from Linux. This release adds 26 operations, for 250 in all. Most of it is about speed and about letting an agent see the screen. The changelog lists every change.

Highlights#

• Faster.
  • Virtual iPhone: the renderer copies and converts each frame on several threads. Live, against 1.2.1 on the same script, the Store chain took 3.9 instead of 7.1 ms a present.
  • Android: stopping a Tomacco-managed emulator saves its Quick Boot snapshot, and the next start resumes from it: 8.6 s instead of a 21.4 s cold boot for a Pixel 11 Pro Fold emulator.
  • Agents: TOMACCO_MCP_TOOLS=compact or grouped shrinks the tool list an agent reads from 316 KB to 156 KB or 33 KB.
  • Desktop: ready after 346 instead of 404 ms (median, offscreen).
  • Installing no longer needs Python; the package's own tomaccoctl installs it, in about a second.
• Seeing the screen. screen.marks draws numbered boxes over what can be tapped and screen.tap taps a number; screen.tree is a short text form of the UI; screen.ocr reads text where there is no UI hierarchy, such as on the virtual iPhone; screen.diff says what changed; screen.wait waits for text or a still screen.
• Screen export. screen.export writes a screen as a PNG and a versioned JSON file with the device, display, insets and every element with its bounds, for design tools and visual checks. The format has a JSON Schema.
• Android performance. Run Macrobenchmark modules as jobs, generate and install Baseline Profiles, and compare cold starts with and without one in a single call (profile.baseline_compare). profile.startup also times app starts on the virtual iPhone and on an iPhone over USB.
• Agents. Guardrails with policies, approvals and an audit log; workflow.run for several steps in one call; MCP resource templates and elicitation. The agent skill is now a short router with generated references for every operation; it is also at tomacco.dev/skill.
• Android emulators. Camera images, simulated sensors, foldables, App Links checks and network capture.
• Omarchy. Menu entries, optional key bindings, job notifications, the theme's accent in the panel, screenshots in Omarchy's folder, and tomaccoctl omarchy status and repair.
• Linux hosts and ARM64. doctor describes the host; releases carry aarch64 packages; the Linux distributions page says what ran where.
• Documentation online. The guides and the operation reference are at tomacco.dev/docs.

Changed behaviour#

• Installing and updating run in tomaccoctl; install.py hands over to it.
• With --omarchy, desktop screenshots go to Omarchy's screenshot folder instead of Pictures/Tomacco.
• When an MCP client closes the server's input, calls still running get 5 seconds and are then cancelled, so the server exits.
• New emulators get less memory and fewer processors on small hosts, and an emulator nobody chose a renderer for starts with swiftshader on a host without a hardware graphics driver.
• ios.virtual.start refuses hosts that are not x86_64 or have less than 12 GiB of memory.
• An argument array whose schema asks for unique items now refuses repeated items.

Limits#

The 1.1.0 limits still apply. In addition:

• Tested with stand-ins only, not on real devices or projects: the iPhone-over-USB features, Flutter, React Native, Expo and Kotlin Multiplatform runs, Wi-Fi pairing, and the Zed, VS Code and OpenCode agent setups.
• The screen operations and the screen export ran live on an Android emulator; on the virtual iPhone and an iPhone over USB they are tested with recorded screens only. OCR marks whole lines of text, and a screen with light and dark areas may need a region.
• Macrobenchmark and Baseline Profile numbers came from an emulator, whose variation is as large as some of the differences; measure on a phone.
• The Omarchy menu, key bindings and notifications were tested in a scratch home, not in a live Omarchy session.
• On the virtual iPhone, the Settings app's top-level list can show a placeholder symbol instead of each row's icon; troubleshooting has the call that brings them back after a restart.
• The Docker image is not published: it contains Google's Android SDK, whose license you accept when you build it.

Install and upgrade#

curl -fsSL https://tomacco.dev/install.sh | bash

An installed 1.2 shows a banner at the top of the window that offers the update; 1.1.0 shows it in its status bar and installs it from Settings. Every replaced file is backed up, and update.rollback undoes an update.

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