rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH
rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH is #191 in Developer Tools Free in United States and charting in 3 of 24 countries we track.
Updated 27 Sep 2026 · rankings refresh through the day
DeveloperRootshell LLC
CategoryDeveloper Tools
PriceFree
Released
Rating★ 5.0 (4)
Version1.0.12
Age rating4+
First seen by us
25 Sep 2026
Installs (est.)5k+ worldwide
Rating
5.0 ★
4 ratings
Measured
Best rank now
#191
Measured
rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH on the App Store
App details
App ID
6755794662
Publisher
Rootshell LLC
Minimum OS
iOS 18.0+
Content rating
4+
Languages
25
AR CA CS DA NL EN FI FR DE HE HU IT …
Size
392 MB
rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH downloads
Worldwide, per day, and installs to date. The band is open; the exact number is free with an account.
How this is calculated
Apple publishes no download counts. iPhone downloads come from chart positions and daily rating growth per country, calibrated on Google Play install counts; lifetime installs from ratings worldwide × installs per rating. Confidence is the chance the real number is within half to double ours.
Where rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH's downloads come from Modelled
Last 30 days: organic search, browsing the store, features and paid ads.
Active users
All platforms, worldwide. Free with an account.
Stickiness (DAU / MAU)
how many monthly users open it on a given day
Retention · share of new users still active
Day 1
Day 7
Day 30
Time spent · per daily user
Average time spent Pro
min a day
Sessions a day Pro
Time per session Pro
min
How this is calculated
Monthly users come from lifetime installs across every store, fitted on monthly active user figures companies publish; daily users = monthly × the typical daily/monthly ratio for the category. Confidence is the chance the real number is within half to double ours.
Where it ranks now
Every top chart it appears in across 24 countries.
| Country | Charts | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| Developer ToolsFree | #191 | |
| Developer ToolsFree | #109 | |
| Developer ToolsFree | #148 |
Apps near rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH on the chart
Developer Tools Free, around #191.
Ratings
App Store, worldwide.
Rating
5.0 ★
4 ratings
Measured
Ratings
4
Measured
About rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH
rootshell is a desktop-class terminal emulator built on libghostty — the GPU-accelerated engine behind the Ghostty desktop terminal. A local shell on every platform, Mac screen sharing, native SSH, mosh-compatible roaming, tssh, system-wide VPN, native git, and Metal rendering in a single app.
NEW: SCREEN SHARING
Reach your Mac's screen, not just its shell, from your iPhone or iPad. High Performance mode streams up to 4K at 60 FPS, fully encrypted. Match Client sizing spins up a virtual display sized exactly to your device: no panning, no letterboxing, with remote system audio. Standard VNC mode covers Linux and headless machines, and tunnels over SSH jump hosts. Nothing to install on the Mac — turn on Screen Sharing and connect. Touch, trackpad, hardware keyboard, and two-way clipboard all work, in tabs, splits, or full screen.
METAL-ACCELERATED TERMINAL
Built on libghostty's Zig core with direct Metal rendering. Smooth scrolling, zero-flicker synchronized output, and full mouse capture for tmux, vim, and zellij. Tabs, split panes, and persistent scrollback across app restarts.
THREE REMOTE PROTOCOLS, ONE APP
• SSH — Native Swift SSH client with Ed25519, ECDSA, RSA, and post-quantum ML-KEM + ML-DSA. Jump hosts, port and agent forwarding, and Keychain password storage.
• Rootshell Roam — Mosh-compatible sessions survive network changes and app restarts. Multipath TCP bonds WiFi and cellular. Predictive local echo keeps typing responsive. STUN-based NAT traversal punches through firewalls.
• tssh with QUIC (TLS 1.3) and KCP transport for lower latency, full native scrollback, and session resumption.
NATIVE TMUX INTEGRATION
Attach in control mode (tmux -CC) and tmux windows become native tabs, panes become real splits — copy, search, and scroll with native gestures. A dashboard shows live window previews, and tabs survive restarts over tssh.
SSH VPN
Turn any SSH or tssh session into a system-wide VPN. Route all device traffic through your remote server. No extra software on the server — if you can SSH to it, you can VPN through it.
NATIVE GIT
Clone, commit, diff, log, blame, rebase, cherry-pick, and worktree — in native Swift with SSH transport. Syntax-highlighted pager output and optional AI-generated commit messages.
VOICE AI AGENT
Talk to an always-on assistant over Gemini Live. It reads scrollback, runs SSH commands hands-free, searches the web, and asks permission before anything risky.
OPTIONAL TEXT AI
Chat with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or 400+ models via OpenRouter. Bring your own API key.
HARDWARE SECURITY KEYS
Private keys never leave hardware. FIDO2/WebAuthn authentication with touch-to-sign.
SANDBOXED LOCAL SHELL
A full local shell with vim 9.1, Helix, SFTP, SCP, curl, jq, mtr, and standard Unix utilities. The rf browser offers yazi-style miller columns with image previews and git indicators. croc peer-to-peer file transfer, flag-aware tab completion, and prompt themes.
CLOUD & KUBERNETES
Connect to AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, A
NEW: SCREEN SHARING
Reach your Mac's screen, not just its shell, from your iPhone or iPad. High Performance mode streams up to 4K at 60 FPS, fully encrypted. Match Client sizing spins up a virtual display sized exactly to your device: no panning, no letterboxing, with remote system audio. Standard VNC mode covers Linux and headless machines, and tunnels over SSH jump hosts. Nothing to install on the Mac — turn on Screen Sharing and connect. Touch, trackpad, hardware keyboard, and two-way clipboard all work, in tabs, splits, or full screen.
METAL-ACCELERATED TERMINAL
Built on libghostty's Zig core with direct Metal rendering. Smooth scrolling, zero-flicker synchronized output, and full mouse capture for tmux, vim, and zellij. Tabs, split panes, and persistent scrollback across app restarts.
THREE REMOTE PROTOCOLS, ONE APP
• SSH — Native Swift SSH client with Ed25519, ECDSA, RSA, and post-quantum ML-KEM + ML-DSA. Jump hosts, port and agent forwarding, and Keychain password storage.
• Rootshell Roam — Mosh-compatible sessions survive network changes and app restarts. Multipath TCP bonds WiFi and cellular. Predictive local echo keeps typing responsive. STUN-based NAT traversal punches through firewalls.
• tssh with QUIC (TLS 1.3) and KCP transport for lower latency, full native scrollback, and session resumption.
NATIVE TMUX INTEGRATION
Attach in control mode (tmux -CC) and tmux windows become native tabs, panes become real splits — copy, search, and scroll with native gestures. A dashboard shows live window previews, and tabs survive restarts over tssh.
SSH VPN
Turn any SSH or tssh session into a system-wide VPN. Route all device traffic through your remote server. No extra software on the server — if you can SSH to it, you can VPN through it.
NATIVE GIT
Clone, commit, diff, log, blame, rebase, cherry-pick, and worktree — in native Swift with SSH transport. Syntax-highlighted pager output and optional AI-generated commit messages.
VOICE AI AGENT
Talk to an always-on assistant over Gemini Live. It reads scrollback, runs SSH commands hands-free, searches the web, and asks permission before anything risky.
OPTIONAL TEXT AI
Chat with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or 400+ models via OpenRouter. Bring your own API key.
HARDWARE SECURITY KEYS
Private keys never leave hardware. FIDO2/WebAuthn authentication with touch-to-sign.
SANDBOXED LOCAL SHELL
A full local shell with vim 9.1, Helix, SFTP, SCP, curl, jq, mtr, and standard Unix utilities. The rf browser offers yazi-style miller columns with image previews and git indicators. croc peer-to-peer file transfer, flag-aware tab completion, and prompt themes.
CLOUD & KUBERNETES
Connect to AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, A
Latest updates
1.0.12
SFTP File Manager
- Browse local folders and remote SSH or tssh hosts side by side. Copy and move files and folders, rename items, create folders, preview files and open folders in a terminal.
- Track queued transfers with progress, speed, cancellation and retry. Resolve conflicts with Replace, Skip or Keep Both.
- Open from the keyboard toolbar or Cmd-Shift-U. Use a sidebar or floating overlay on iPad, or a sheet on iPhone, with hardware keyboard navigation.
New Terminal Keyboard
- Optional English QWERTY keyboard with swipe-accessible Symbols, Navigation and Shortcuts pages. Choose Shell, Vim, Emacs, Nano or Agent presets, use sticky modifiers, and hold Space to move the cursor.
- Seven styles: Flat, Sculpted, Steampunk, Phosphor, Beige Box, Neon Grid and Circuit Board. Customize theme colors, height, haptics and optional key sounds.
- Float or dock the keyboard on iPad. Keep keyboard state shared across tabs or remember it per tab. Optional spelling suggestions apply only when tapped.
- Enable in Settings > Terminal > Terminal Keyboard. Switch to Apple's keyboard for other languages, emoji, swipe typing or dictation. iPhone adds live previews and a hands-on keyboard tutorial.
herdr Control Mode
- Use native rootshell tabs and split panes for herdr over SSH or tssh. Manage workspaces and Git worktrees, rearrange panes, and see agent activity and pane notifications.
- Enable Control Mode in the session picker or choose herdr (control) in a profile. Requires herdr 0.9.0 or newer. Regular herdr works in fallback mode; the optional experimental rootshell fork adds smooth native scrolling, global scrollback search and shared viewing with a compatible host.
Sessions & Panes
- Discover Sessions rescans without reconnecting. Automatic remote discovery has its own setting, and the iPhone session picker better accommodates the keyboard and larger text.
- Open in Folder (Cmd-Shift-J) creates a tab or split in a folder on the focused host, with browsing, completion and recent folders.
- Choose Pane to Zoom (Option-Cmd-P) shows numbered panes in tmux and herdr control mode. Tap a pane or type its number to zoom it.
- Optional confirmation before closing a split pane. Improved tmux split equalization, divider dragging and scroll-position preservation.
- Drag images and PDFs from Files or Photos into SSH-backed terminals to upload, including tmux and herdr control-mode panes.
Touch & Appearance
- Animated Gesture Help in Settings > Terminal explains gestures for your device. With rootshell's selection loupe enabled, hold and tap the loupe with a second finger to right-click or drag in mouse-aware terminal apps.
- Screen Sharing gains Trackpad pointer mode, adjustable pointer speed and a choice of local or remote cursor.
- New customizable Aquarium background and enhanced Jellyfish graphics. Choose independent effects for the terminal keyboard and iPad sidebar.
Connections & Reliability
- Added OpenSSH strict key exchange and improved compatibility with servers including MikroTik RouterOS. Fixed keepalive hangs, greeting-related host-key verification failures, data loss during key renewal and HMAC authentication failures.
- Configure tssh connection timeouts per profile. Improved SSH and Screen Sharing survival during brief app switches when Keep SSH Alive in Background is enabled, subject to iOS background limits.
- Fixed garbled terminal content during resizing and out-of-order SSH size updates, plus content extending beneath the iPhone keyboard toolbar.
- Improved dictation corrections, including Korean input, and hardware keyboard mod-tap behavior. Fixed unresponsive iPadOS 27 menu commands and crashes from malformed YubiKey RSA public keys.
- Hidden tabs retain lower GPU memory use after layout changes. Updated AI model choices for OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon Bedrock connections.