Why not one of the others?
phonedriver compared with adb, mobile‑mcp and phone‑harness
On nine real phone jobs phonedriver passed 27 of 27 runs with 6.9x fewer tokens than mobile‑mcp and 1.7x fewer than phone‑harness, and it reads a screen 170x faster than adb. Each page links its method and raw data.
phonedriver vs adb
phonedriver against plain adb on an Android emulator. 170x faster UI tree reads, 32x faster screenshots, 23x faster typing, and a bare tap that is 2.4 to 4.4 times faster. A HONOR X8 phone gave 32x and 61x on two operations. What adb still does better.
170xfaster screen readsphonedriver vs mobile-mcp
Two MCP servers that let an AI agent control a phone. On nine real phone jobs on one emulator, mobile-mcp used 6.9 times the tokens of phonedriver and passed 17 of 18 runs against 27 of 27. What each reads, installs, waits for and sends, and what I have not measured.
6.9xfewer tokens, nine jobsphonedriver vs phone-harness
On nine real phone jobs phonedriver passed 27 of 27 runs and phone-harness 0.3.3 passed 14 of 18, using 1.7 times the tokens and 4.4 times the time. Per operation phonedriver was 2.4 to 186 times faster. Measured on one emulator, with how each tool drives a phone and what each sends home.
1.7xfewer tokens, nine jobs