How to use appium to just drive actions

I’m relatively new to appium and I’m trying to use appium to just drive actions on the device. I have another utility that can open and close the app. But from my current usage of appium, it doesn’t seem I’m able to start and close an appium session without launching the activity and having ti close when the test finishes. I’ve tried setting the capabilities to “noReset=false” and “autoLaunch=false”, but nothing happens in unless I also call “launchApp()”.

Basically I’m wondering if I can just have appium use the currently running app and start a session with that activity. Then when the test is finished, it will terminate the session to allow other appium tests to run but not quit the app.

Thanks!