The frustration

We manage servers from our phones. Not because it's ideal, but because sometimes it's necessary — a production incident at 2 AM, a server check while travelling, a quick config edit between meetings. Our phones are always with us. Laptops aren't.

Android has had SSH clients for years. We tried most of them. The experience was consistently disappointing, and in ways that weren't obvious from the Play Store listing.

Some clients required an account. Not because they had a server-side feature that needed authentication — just to use the app at all. Your SSH credentials, stored somewhere in their cloud infrastructure. No thanks.

Some charged for features that should be free. SSH agent forwarding — a core SSH feature used by every developer working with bastion hosts — was locked behind expensive subscriptions on competing apps. ProxyJump, the standard way to hop through a bastion server, same thing. Port forwarding, locked on others.

The ones that were "free" had UI that belonged in 2012. No multi-tab support. No hardware keyboard shortcuts. No Mosh. No proper terminal emulation.

What we actually wanted

A list came together quickly, because we'd been thinking about it every time we reached for our phones:

  • SSH and Mosh, both, free. No artificial tier split.
  • Keys stored in Android Keystore — hardware-backed, never uploaded, never exported in plaintext.
  • No account required. The app works the moment you install it.
  • SSH agent forwarding, ProxyJump, port forwarding — free. These are SSH fundamentals.
  • Multi-tab sessions. How is this not table stakes in 2026?
  • Hardware keyboard support. Anyone using SSH on a tablet or foldable phone is probably using a keyboard.
  • A real SFTP client — not a file viewer that lets you download things. An actual browser with upload, delete, rename, and an inline editor.
  • Server monitoring. Real-time CPU, RAM, disk, network. Nothing in the Android SSH space offered this.
  • Encrypted session logs. An audit trail, on-device only, AES-256-GCM.

We wrote this list and realised we weren't describing something particularly ambitious. This was just table stakes for a professional tool. And it didn't exist.

What we built

FOS Terminal took about a year of active development. The hard parts weren't SSH — there are good libraries. The hard parts were:

Terminal emulation. Proper xterm-256color rendering, full Unicode (CJK wide characters are notoriously difficult), correct scrollback behaviour, and hardware keyboard mapping. Getting tmux, vim, htop, and ncurses apps to render correctly on Android took longer than we'd like to admit.

Mosh. Mosh is UDP-based, which means completely different networking assumptions. Getting it reliable on mobile — where the IP address changes constantly — required significant testing across network conditions.

Android Keystore integration. Private keys in the Android Keystore are hardware-backed on most modern devices. They can sign data but never be exported in plaintext. Building key management around this constraint — while still being usable — was a careful UX problem.

SFTP inline editor. This ended up being one of our most distinctive features. Not just a viewer — an actual editor, with 150+ file type recognition, that writes changes back via SFTP in-place. No other Android SSH client offers this.

Server monitoring without an agent. Reading CPU, RAM, disk, and network stats over SSH — without installing anything on the server, using only standard Unix commands — turned out to be surprisingly reliable. It works on any Linux server out of the box.

How we priced it

We thought carefully about this. We're a small, independent team. We don't have enterprise sales, investor pressure, or marketing budgets. We have a product and users who find it useful.

The decision: make the free tier genuinely good. 41 features, no artificial limits on connections or tabs, all the security features, 7-day encrypted session logs. SSH agent forwarding and ProxyJump — features that competing apps charge premium prices for — are free in FOS Terminal.

Pro adds 13 features that represent meaningful additional work to build and maintain: the SFTP editor, server monitoring, unlimited session logs, cloud sync, biometric lock, snippets, custom themes, Asciinema recording, analytics, and sharing features.

Pricing: €6.99/month, €19.99/year, or €29.99 lifetime. The lifetime deal is our favourite — one payment, every future feature included, no annual fee. It'll increase to €49.99 after early access.

What's next

We launched with more features than most SSH clients that have been around for five years. That's not because we're particularly fast developers — it's because we knew exactly what we wanted before we started writing code.

Next up: per-host terminal themes, SFTP batch operations, server monitoring alerts (push notification when CPU spikes), and improvements to the AI command helper. The roadmap is on the changelog page.

If you find a bug, miss a feature, or just want to tell us the terminal font rendering is wrong on your specific device — email us at [email protected]. We read every message.

FOS Terminal is free to download on Google Play.