# EmpiricCommander File Manager — Dual-pane SFTP, SSH and Git

> Dual-pane SFTP, SSH and Git (iPhone/iPad app by Burlac Mihail.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/empiriccommander-file-manager/id6763745217 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Burlac Mihail](https://appshunter.io/developer/1895471114)
- Category: Productivity, Utilities
- Price: Free with in-app purchases
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 17.0 · 31 MB
- Languages: American English, French (France), German (Germany), Romanian, European Spanish
- Released: 2026-05-13
- Data updated: 2026-08-30
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/empiriccommander-file-manager/id6763745217/reviews.md

## What is EmpiricCommander File Manager?

A real file manager for iPad - and for Mac and iPhone. Two panes side by side, drag between them, and move files where they belong without exporting or round-tripping through the Files app.

PHOTOS OFF YOUR PHONE
The Files app cannot see your photo library. EmpiricCommander can: browse your albums like folders and copy them to a USB-C drive, your NAS, SFTP, S3 - any destination, no account required. Originals are copied byte for byte with EXIF and location intact, a second run copies only what is new, and Free Up Space deletes a photo only after the copy has been read back and verified.

THE WHOLE LOOP, NO MAC NEEDED
Clone a repository over HTTPS or SSH, open a file in the built-in editor with syntax highlighting, stage your changes, commit, and push - on iPad and iPhone, without a separate terminal app. A commit log with a rendered branch and merge graph shows what happened, per-file diffs show exactly what changed, and merge conflicts are resolved in-app, per file.

A REAL SSH TERMINAL
An interactive shell to your server, from inside the file manager, on Mac, iPad and iPhone. iOS ships no ssh binary, so this is a full client implementation rather than a wrapper around a system tool.

CONNECT TO WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE
SMB network shares (your NAS, Mac, or Windows PC), SFTP with key authentication, S3 and S3-compatible storage, FTP, WebDAV, Azure Blob, Dropbox, and more - browsed, copied, and moved like local folders. Your connection list syncs across your devices through iCloud; passwords stay in the Keychain and are never uploaded.

BUILT FOR REAL FILE WORK
- Dual-pane on Mac and iPad, with a tab bar on iPhone.
- Streaming transfers, including remote to remote, with progress that survives leaving the app.
- Folder Sync in four modes, and Compare Folders with SHA-256 verification so you can prove a copy is byte-for-byte identical.
- Batch rename with regex, numbering and dates, previewed before it runs.
- Browse inside ZIP archives like folders; create ZIP and TAR/GZ; read password-protected archives.
- Duplicate finder, disk-usage treemap, checksums, permissions editor.
- Quick Look plus rich preview for CSV, JSON, Markdown, YAML, TOML and source code.
- Full hardware-keyboard support on iPad: arrows, shift-selection, Tab, Esc, Return, Space.

ON-DEVICE AI
Describe a batch rename in plain words, or summarize a document, using Apple Intelligence. It runs entirely on your device: no account, no API key, no per-use cost, and your filenames and file contents never leave the device.

ONE PURCHASE, THREE PLATFORMS
Buy once and use EmpiricCommander on your Mac, iPad and iPhone - one device of each type. Not a subscription. This major version and all of its updates are included.

PRIVACY
No tracking. Diagnostics are strictly opt-in.

## Pricing and in-app purchases

Base price: Free.

**One-time purchases**

| Purchase | Price | Type |
| --- | --- | --- |
| EmpiricCommander Pro | $29.99 | one-time |



## Version history (last 5 releases)

### 2.8.0 — 2026-08-28

Step through your photos. With an image open, swipe (iPhone/iPad) or use the arrow keys (Mac) to move to the next one - on every source, including SFTP, S3, WebDAV and the Photos library. Only images are in the run, the position counter agrees, and on remote sources each step downloads just what you're looking at plus one neighbour.
- Redesigned multi-select bar on iPhone: five actions that always fit, the rest under More - nothing gets cut off, whatever the destination's name.
- External Folders now sits above Connections in the iPhone sidebar, so your drive is one tap away even with many servers saved.
- New on Mac: the app's own CPU and memory usage at the right of the status bar (Settings > General to hide it).
- Enter confirms dialogs when using a hardware keyboard on iPhone and iPad.
- Security improvement to sign-in.

### 2.7.2 — 2026-08-26

External drives on iPhone, made dependable. This release fixes the full lifecycle of a USB stick or SD card: a pulled drive no longer leaves a stale listing behind, a re-inserted drive can be read again without re-picking it, and folders on an absent drive show a clear "Not connected" row with a reconnect hint instead of a permission error. External folders can now be renamed, and rows are labeled by the drive's own name instead of a UUID. Also fixed: the Devices list notices a drive arriving, Photos Compare no longer offers to duplicate an album onto the drive that already holds it, and on the Mac the permission dialog at every launch is gone and a local sidebar click while browsing a remote stays local.

### 2.7.0 — 2026-08-23

New
• Your photo library is now a place you can copy out of. Photos appears beside your connections - All Photos, Recents, Favourites, Screenshots, Videos, Albums and Years - and anything in it can be copied to a drive, a NAS, a server or a bucket. Files.app cannot see Photos at all, which is why this has never been possible from a file manager on iPhone.
• The copy is the original, byte for byte, so dates and locations travel with it. Nothing is re-encoded unless you ask for it.
• Choose how they land before they land. Folders by year and month or by album, names with the date in front, Live Photos as a pair or just the still - and every choice shows an example of its own output, so you are picking a result rather than a label.
• A summary before anything is copied: how many photos and videos, how many files that becomes, and the dates they span. A Live Photo is two files, and the screen says so before you find out on the server.
• Photos that live in iCloud are downloaded first, with their own progress line above the copy, and each one that fails says which it was and why.
• Convert to JPEG on the way out, off by default. Dates and locations survive the conversion; videos are never touched.
• The second run copies only what is new. EmpiricCommander remembers what already reached that destination, so exporting the same album again copies the photos you have taken since.
• Free up space after a copy, when the copy has been checked. Nothing is offered for deletion that was not read back from the destination and matched. If a single file did not, the offer is withdrawn and says why.

Fixed
• The Files.app extension could stop working entirely if you had around six or more saved connections: it was handing the system a marker larger than the system allows, and the extension shut down on every attempt to list your connections.
• Compare could close the app when two files in a folder shared a name - which happens in a photo library, and can happen on Google Drive. It now compares what it can and says how many it could not match.
• Compare also called two files identical when it knew neither one's size. It now says it did not compare them.
• Disk Usage could close the app on a folder with tens of thousands of files. The list is built as you scroll, and the chart draws the largest entries with the rest folded into one.
• Copying from Photos held every file in memory as it went, which on videos could reach well over a gigabyte. It now goes through disk, and a copy that used to peak at 1.36 GB peaks at 207 MB.
• Progress no longer sits at 0% and jumps: the bar moves while a file uploads on Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Azure and WebDAV, and the transfer card shows how many files of the batch are done.
• Item counts are written as plain digits again - "13764 items", not a number that reads as a decimal.

### 2.6.0 — 2026-08-22

New
- Compress to ZIP on a remote pane. Select files or folders on SFTP, SMB, S3 or any connection and archive them in place - the round trip happens for you, and cancelling leaves - nothing behind on the server.
- Share a remote file from iPhone and iPad. The file is downloaded first, so what you send is the file on the server, not a local one that happens to share its path.
- Preview a .pages, .numbers or .key stored on a server. Tapping one opens the document instead of dropping you inside the package folder.
- A different phrasing for an AI commit message. The Draft button becomes Try another phrasing once it has written something, and leaves your own text alone.
- A warning before opening a remote file in another app, where your edits would stay in the copy. Editing with Open With or the built-in editor still saves back to the server.

Fixed
- Saving a Google Drive file could create a second file named as a long string of letters and numbers, leaving the original unchanged. If you edited files on Drive with an earlier version, look next to the original for such a file - it holds that edit.
- Saving twice in a row from an external editor could cancel the first save and lose the second. Both now arrive.
- A file edited from Files.app on a Google Drive connection reported success without uploading anything. It uploads, and says so when it cannot.
- A failed download could be handed to Quick Look as though it were the document. The error now says what happened - including when the file is a Google Docs document with nothing to download.
- One connection to a server that is off no longer stops the whole EmpiricCommander folder in Files.app from updating. Unreachable servers show a file that names the host.
- A connection deleted or renamed in the app now reaches Files.app. If a folder still looks stale, Settings > Connections > Refresh Files App Listing.
- Compressing a large folder on a remote could fail with an error naming a temporary file. The archive is uploaded before it is cleaned up.
- A saved password edited with iCloud sync on could be stored twice, and which one was used was undefined. One password, and it is the new one.
- Downloads no longer keep a second copy of every file in a hidden cache.

### 2.5.0 — 2026-08-18

Files over 150 MB now upload to Dropbox. They previously failed after minutes of copying, because Dropbox's single-request upload has a hard limit and we had no other path; large files are now sent in pieces.

On iPhone
• Send a file straight to the other pane: Copy to and Move to now sit in the row menu and in the selection bar, and they name the destination.
• Connections in the Files app work again. The extension could not read saved passwords once iCloud sync had touched them, so every folder opened empty.
• A connection whose password cannot be read now says so in a file you can open, instead of showing an empty folder.

Fixes
• The copy confirmation on iPhone no longer closes itself before you can tap it.

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## More apps by Burlac Mihail

- [Metis: Markdown Notes](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/metis-markdown-notes/id6785268461)

All apps by Burlac Mihail: https://appshunter.io/developer/1895471114

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-30.*