BrowserStack, AWS Device Farm and Sauce Labs rent you someone else's iPhone for a session, then wipe it. Zeptap is your iPhone, and it stays signed in.
| Feature | Zeptap | Device farms |
|---|---|---|
| Whose iPhone | Yours, on your desk | Theirs, in a data center |
| Accounts stay signed in | Yes | No, devices are cleaned between sessions |
| App Store apps | Any | Your uploaded builds, plus a few preinstalled apps |
| Screen data | Stays on your Mac, goes only to your agent | Streamed through the vendor's cloud |
| Latency | Local USB and Bluetooth | Over the internet |
| Devices in parallel | 3 per license | Dozens, per parallel-session plan |
| Pricing | $99 once or $25 a month | Monthly per parallel session, or per minute |
A farm device is wiped after your session, so there's no brand Instagram, no 2FA app and no message history waiting on it. Your own iPhone already has all of that, which is what an agent running account operations or errands actually needs.
Zeptap has no account and no cloud. The screen is read on your Mac, the MCP server only listens on 127.0.0.1, and screenshots go only to the agent you connect. Your iMessages and banking screens never pass through a vendor's servers.
Farms bill per parallel session or per device minute, which adds up fast for something that runs every morning. Zeptap is $99 once or $25 a month, for 3 Macs and 3 iPhones.
If you need to test a build across dozens of iPhone models and iOS versions, run large suites in parallel in CI, or don't have iPhones on hand, a device farm is the right tool. Zeptap is for your own phones, signed in to your own accounts, driven by your agent.
The docs go deeper, and they're written for agents to read too.
Probably not. Zeptap drives up to 3 of your own iPhones from one license and doesn't run scripted suites across device models. It's for agents using real phones with real accounts, not large-scale device coverage.
Yes. The screen comes over a USB cable and touch goes over Bluetooth, so the iPhone sits next to the Mac it's plugged into.
Only to the agent you connect, and from there to its model provider. Zeptap has no cloud and no account, and the MCP server only accepts connections from the same Mac.