Termius: Terminal & SSH client

I have been in IT for 15 years at this point and have used basically every major terminal emulator and SFTP client there is on every platform (PC/Mac/Android/iOS/Linux/Solaris/BSD/HP-unix/et al.) Paid, free, doesn't matter, I’ve shelled out the cash to buy serious SSH clients. But none have really cleaned up the whole experience as well as Termius here. I can shift between any of my systems, iPad, iPhone, Mac, PC and share the same set of devices, public key auth credentials, and scripts. Nobody does it like this, at this level of quality, in such a great looking cross-platform UI. Yes, it costs money for the subscription. SO WHAT! Do you want to have a cloud service that does all the above and gets better with time while responding to new tech? You gotta help pay the developers that make that work. Just give it a shot, the 14 day free trial thing will tell you all you need to know. For me, I have paid upwards of $700 for other systems that provide these features.... on PC/MAC... but not mobile as well. So is Termius worth a few bucks a month? Of course. Would highly recommend.

response required

My single star is of course for the paid version only. 5 stars for the free version. One part of the pricing controversy is that because the app is freemium, the star ratings for the free version and for the subscription version are combined. The free version is wildly popular, while I suspect from scrolling down the list that the subscription version rates between 1 and 3 stars entirely because of the unreasonable cost and subscription model. Ultimately the future of the full-featured version will be decided by the revenue the developer is able to extract from willing customers. Should the overpriced subscriptions fail to support their desired income level, I worry that they may simply take their ball and go home, abandoning the product, which would be a shame. It is truly a magnificent app. But it takes humility to back up and accept working for less money than you feel you deserve, and the main author doesn’t write like he is rich in humility, but of course I don’t know, that could be unfair. I do know that I am with the greater crowd of people who would pay something for the app but will deprive ourselves willingly in protest at both the price and the execrable subscription model. I hope the future of the app becomes clearer: stay as is, become cheaper, or whatever else. Despite my position, I do wish the developer some degree of success. There is great talent there.

This is a great SSH client, with support for saving identities, key generation, and port forwarding even in the free version. The only downside is sessions cannot stay open in the background for more than 3 minutes, but that is a limitation of iOS itself, not Termius. I also wish it advised users to use SSH instead of Telnet the first time they use it because Telnet is unencrypted and you should really avoid using it if at all possible. I use Termius for connecting to my Debian server when I don't have my computer on me and need to do something that I can't do through the Webmin interface. The port forwarding feature comes in handy when I need to do something like connect to said Webmin interface remotely or use OpenVPN in public places when it is blocked (Surprisingly, I have run into this problem before, at an airport). Overall, a great app if you have a server and don't want to carry a computer around to access it.

ask user to change the rating

Good grief, they just added a long annoying startup animation instead of just showing my SSH session! Worst update ever! I was getting annoyed by the deterioration of this app, but this may be the final straw. They'll have to improve if they want me to subscribe. This application has steadily gotten worse as I have used it. A year ago, I could switch away to a browser and come back to the terminal with everything as I left it. Today, if I'm gone for 10 seconds I'm disconnected, and if by some miracle I stayed connected, the keyboard is messed up. Turning on location support doesn't even help much. Also, I consistently have to play a stupid game of hiding the keyboard and popping it back up to get it to display properly, and despite their reply they have done NOTHING to fix split keyboard support. Given how poor the quality of life has become with Termius I have a feeling this dev doesn't test their app with split keyboard, and may not test on the iPad at all.

response required

This app was great during the trial period. My favorite feature was that port forwarding didn’t time out after a few minutes, like it does for so many other apps. For two weeks, I was truly able to use my iPad Pro as a mobile workstation, working on Jupyter notebooks hosted on my desktop at work. Then the free trial expired, and port forwarding sessions began to die in the background after just a minute or two. This breaks the functionality of the app for me, rendering it basically useless. I understand why some of Termius’s advanced features can justifiably be sold as part of a subscription, but the way their pricing is currently structured, the developer gives you a taste of a working app for two weeks and then tries to charge you $100 to not intentionally break the app for one year. I refuse to pay anyone a subscription to keep them from breaking their own product. Charge me $20 up front and I’d be happy to pay. As it stands, I’ll go back to hauling my laptop around before I give this extortionist developer a cent of my money.