Comparison

Nerd Font Installer vs ShellDiver

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side โ€” with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Nerd Font Installer

Features
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Nerd Font Installer puts your terminal and coding fonts on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro. Browse the catalog, preview the real glyphs, and install through the system's own consent sheet. No account. No analytics. Your data never leaves your device. THE CATALOG JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, Hack, Cascadia Code, Iosevka, Monaspace, Zed Mono, OpenDyslexic, and the rest of the canon. The app ships the complete catalog, and each family is patched with the full Nerd Fonts glyph set, so Powerline arrows, Font Awesome, Material Design, Devicons, Octicons, and Weather icons render instead of showing tofu. The grid reads like a periodic table: every family gets a tile with its own designation, drawn in the font itself. PREVIEWS THAT TELL THE TRUTH Previews are rendered live in the real font: programming ligatures, Powerline segments, and syntax-highlighted code samples, alongside every icon set. What you see is what your prompt gets. THE INSTALL Installation goes through the font support Apple builds into iOS. iOS draws its own consent sheet, you approve it, and the font is available system-wide: in your terminal, your editor, wherever fonts are picked. Nothing installs behind your back, and removing a font is just as direct. AFTER THE INSTALL A quickstart shows where your new font turns up in the terminal and editor apps you already run, including the ones that keep their own font lists, and it coaches the exact family name to pick. FREE FOR MOST PEOPLE One font is free, and one is what most setups need. Installing more is a single one-time purchase. No subscription. Buy it once, keep it for good, and share it with your family. PRIVACY Nerd Font Installer has no user accounts and ships no analytics, telemetry, or advertising SDKs. There is no tracking SDK in it because there is no tracking. The privacy policy is short enough to actually read. CREDITS The fonts belong to their designers and to the Nerd Fonts project. Every family ships under its own open-source license, readable in the app. I built the installer; they built the fonts. Built by Rimrock Systems in Payson, Arizona.

About

ShellDiver

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With software, free is usually a question rather than an answer. Here it is arithmetic: no server of ours, no accounts, no analytics โ€” nothing for a subscription to pay for. Sync, startup commands, port forwarding: all of it is in the app. WHERE YOUR KEYS LIVE In your device's keychain. ShellDiver has no account and no sign-in โ€” there is simply nowhere on our side for anything of yours to sit. An Ed25519 key either travels with you through iCloud Keychain, end-to-end encrypted, or stays on this device behind Face ID. A Secure Enclave key is created inside the security chip. It cannot be read out โ€” not even by ShellDiver โ€” never leaves the device, and will ask for Face ID on every sign-in if you want it to. THE VAULT Instead of iCloud you can take syncing into your own hands: an encrypted file in a place you choose. A USB stick, a cloud folder, or your own WebDAV server, so Nextcloud, ownCloud, a Synology, an Apache with mod_dav. It works across different Apple IDs and carries the secrets with it: saved server passwords and private keys. Only your devices encrypt and decrypt. Whoever runs the storage location sees nothing but unreadable files. You add a second device with a QR code, without typing your passphrase there. THE TERMINAL It does not hang up because you looked somewhere else for a minute: the connection belongs to the session, not to the screen. The running build and the half-typed line are still there when you come back. Up to 20 sessions as tabs, terminals and files mixed. Real xterm emulation: colour, UTF-8, resizing that works โ€” htop, vim and colourful logs look the way you expect. Plus search through the scrollback, your choice of monospaced font including Nerd Fonts, and five colour schemes. On iPhone there is a row above the keyboard with esc, ctrl, tab, arrows and a paste key, because a phone has no โŒ˜V. When the link drops, ShellDiver notices through keepalives and rebuilds it by itself. This is SSH, not Mosh: the new shell starts fresh. SIGNING IN WITHOUT GUESSING ShellDiver asks the server which methods it offers and works through whatever it holds credentials for. That covers publickey followed by keyboard-interactive โ€” 2FA after the key โ€” and equally a server that only offers keyboard-interactive while the host is saved as "password". One-time codes are never pre-filled and never stored. You confirm a host key once, by its fingerprint. Every connection after that checks it, and a key that has changed is refused rather than waved through. THROUGH A JUMP HOST When a server is only open on the inside, you give it a jump host โ€” OpenSSH's ProxyJump. The jump host then forwards nothing but encrypted bytes and cannot read along; both sign-ins are signed on this device. So your key does not have to sit on the machine in between, and a Secure Enclave key works here too. FILES AND TUNNELS The SFTP browser downloads and uploads, whole folders included, renames, and deletes recursively. Local port forwarding brings a database or an admin interface onto this device. It listens on 127.0.0.1 only and cannot be reached from outside; each rule holds its own connection, so a tunnel does not fall with a terminal. WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE Your ~/.ssh/config is imported, with each IdentityFile matched against the keys you have and any ProxyJump resolved; so is known_hosts, hashed entries as far as they can be matched. Keys come in as Ed25519, RSA or ECDSA โ€” from the OpenSSH container, from PuTTY's .ppk (v2 and v3), and from the PEM family. A passphrase on the file is used once during import and not kept. Snippets are also the buttons above the keyboard โ€” global or bound to one host, with a confirmation step if you want one. One per host runs by itself as soon as the shell is open. The backup is a JSON file you can read โ€” secrets sit inside an encrypted block under a passphrase you choose. Without it nobody gets at them, us included.

Screenshots

Nerd Font Installer4 screens
ShellDiver4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: ShellDiver at none against Nerd Font Installer's 1. ShellDiver also leads on iOS requirement (18.0 vs 26.0). On price, update cadence, ads and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price ยท Rating ยท Positive reviews ยท Number of ratings ยท Update frequency ยท Ads ยท In-app purchases ยท Monetization ยท Best chart rank ยท Devices ยท Requires iOS

CostPrice ยท In-app purchases ยท Ads ยท Monetization

Both are free to download. Nerd Font Installer sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. ShellDiver asks for nothing beyond the download.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Nerd Font Installer ships an update every 9 days, ShellDiver every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on September 26, 2026 and September 3, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard2 real differences ยท 4 level
Nerd Font Installer versus ShellDiver: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterNerd Font InstallerShellDiver
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyEvery 9 daysEvery 4 days โ€” better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesNo โ€” better
DevicesiPhone, iPad, Vision ProiPhone, iPad, Mac
Requires iOS26.018.0 โ€” better
Further details โ€” not scored
Size46 MB11 MB
Age rating4+12+
DeveloperJoseph JonesMathias Oysmueller

In-app purchases

1 purchases

Nerd Font Installer

One-time1
  • Unlock All Fonts$3.99
None

ShellDiver

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Nerd Font Installer free?
Nerd Font Installer is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is ShellDiver free?
ShellDiver is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Nerd Font Installer or ShellDiver have ads?
Neither Nerd Font Installer nor ShellDiver shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Nerd Font Installer or ShellDiver?
Nerd Font Installer ships an update every 9 days, and ShellDiver every 4 days. Most recently, Nerd Font Installer was updated on September 26, 2026 and ShellDiver on September 3, 2026.

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