Using your apps

How it fits together

Three things, and it’s worth knowing which is which:

• Apps — the thing you see and click. A habit tracker, a budget, a board. Your AI writes them.
• Collections — where the contents live. A collection is a plain list of items, and it sits outside any single app, so more than one app can read and write the same list.
• The record — every change is stored with who made it, you or your AI, and can be undone.

The practical upshot: deleting an app doesn’t take its contents with it, and a second app can build on the first one’s data instead of starting empty.

Building an app

Ask for it in plain words, in a chat where openmcp.app is connected. “Build me a habit tracker for my three morning habits.” Your AI writes the app, saves it, and opens it right there.

Say what it’s for rather than how it should look. “Something to keep track of what I spend on this trip” gets you a better first version than a list of features, because your AI picks a shape that fits the job.

Apps are single-purpose by design. If you ask for something quite different, you generally get a new app rather than a bigger one — that is deliberate, and it keeps each app easy to change.

Changing an app

Ask again: “add a weekly total”, “make the numbers bigger”, “sort by date”. Your AI edits the app in place and your data stays exactly where it was — the app is a view of the data, not a container for it.

Every save is a new version. If an edit makes things worse, say so: “roll the tracker back to the version before this one.” Restoring doesn’t throw anything away — the old versions stay, so you can go forward again.

Your data

You and your AI write to the same rows. Tick a box in the app and your AI sees it in the next message; ask your AI to add three items and the open app refreshes on its own. There’s no import/export dance between the two of you.

Because collections are shared, you can ask for a second app over the same list — “make me a calendar view of the same trips” — and both stay in step.

Undo and the audit trail

Open Settings at openmcp.app/app and go to the Data section. It lists your collections, which app owns what, and the history of changes with who made each one — you or your AI. Recent changes can be undone from there.

This is the honest answer to “what did my AI do while I wasn’t looking?” — it’s all written down. In a chat window the same Settings app points you to the browser view for the history, because that is where undo lives.

Ready-made apps

The App Store ships finished apps — trackers, planners, logs — with live previews, published by SecondFirst. Ask your AI to install one (“install the reading list app”) and it becomes yours: same data model, and you can change it by asking, exactly like an app your AI wrote from scratch.

Starting from a ready-made app is often faster than describing one from nothing, and you keep the right to reshape it afterwards.

Preferences

The Settings app holds preferences that apply across your apps: language, which day the week starts on, date format, currency, how compact things look, whether deletes ask for confirmation, and how often open apps refresh. Any app can be given its own override for one of these.

Apps that offer their own settings show them there too — you don’t have to hunt through each app for a gear icon.

Files

An app can keep files as well as data — images, PDFs, exports. Ask your AI to save one into a particular app, or to list what an app is holding. Files belong to the app that holds them and stay across chats, like everything else here.

Your total storage is shown at the bottom of the sidebar in openmcp.app/app.

Tidying up

• Archive an app you’re done with for now: it comes off the shelf, but stays whole — data, files and history intact, and it still opens by name. Ask for it back at any time.
• Delete an app when you’re sure: the app itself goes for good. What that does not do is remove the contents — the collection it was reading stays, deliberately, because another app may be using the same list.

So if you want the contents gone too, say so in the same breath: “delete the workout log and clear the entries it was using.” Your AI can remove the items as well; ask it to confirm what it deleted. To remove everything at once, ask us to close your account — see Privacy.

Either way you can just say it in chat — “archive the old workout log” — or work from your app list at openmcp.app/app.

Where it is rough

This is an early beta and some things genuinely don’t work yet — which hosts draw app interfaces, what’s blocked upstream, what’s coming. We keep that list honest and current on the beta status page rather than burying it here.

Next

• Not connected yet, or something isn’t working: Get started (its last section is troubleshooting).
• What we store and how to get it out or delete it: Privacy.
• Running it yourself, or reading the code: the engine on GitHub (AGPL-3.0).
• Something missing from this page? Email [email protected] and tell us which part you had to guess at — that’s how this page grows.