Great app for iPhone and iPad
Has potential, but increasingly bloated with slop
I was psyched when I read about this project—a libghostty-based, totally free SSH client as a desperately needed alternative to Termius & Blink? Yes, please. And the rendering is indeed very nice thanks to libghostty. There are some nice features like the Tailscale SSH integration.
Unfortunately the app has very clearly been developed with heavy LLM assistance to pile in feature upon feature, and the cracks are starting to show. Lots of awesome sounding features barely work once you give them a try—for example, screen sharing inexplicably has *seconds* of lag on the same connection Screens is perfectly snappy on. And then there are the useless features, like the location diary… why?
Also the UI, though pretty enough, is absolutely infuriating, not documented, and not discoverable. The entire project IMO is a cautionary tale on the dangers of `claude —yolo`.
Response from developer
Feel free to reach out on our GitHub page if you are having issues. Our Screen Sharing feature is the only application in the I am aware of on this platform delivering low latency and high resolution and was created due to my frustration with the poor performance of existing apps. Screens only support low resolution and high latency under the best of network conditions limited by legacy RFB only support. It is worth confirming you are not connecting over Tailscale as the app warns as it is unable to handle the high packet rate required. High Performance mode Screen Sharing is intended for use over your local network. Location Diary is similar to Blink and its “geo” command which requires manually activating location services if you are using a TCP based connection and leave the app. Use is optional and is implemented to stay within AppStore guidelines. Fortunately in rootshell we offer multiple options that survive even a full device reboot including both mosh and tssh. Each update has detailed release notes on our website where we have already published over 130 free updates. A large number of our users prefer that we offer options to completely get out of the way turning off app UI chrome and extending full screen. This is always a trade off with discoverability.
Amazing local terminal
Works with AI coding agents and herdr.
The very best, finally!
Great App!
Response from developer
We are happy to investigate any unexpected battery usage. We have provided this user with detailed instructions on how to share relevant debug logs from the application. We are not aware of other users reporting similar issues. In general, iOS and iPadOS prevent our application from running in the background except in limited system-managed scenarios. No user data is sent to us. rootshell does not collect analytics or credentials from users of this application. rootshell also goes beyond many applications by offering multiple authentication options in which we never see a private key, including support for YubiKey, FIDO2, and opkssh. Any claims suggesting otherwise are inaccurate and unsupported.