I used to be chained to my laptop all day just to manage my self-hosted servers or fix minor issues, and I hated waiting until I got back home to handle things. I wanted the freedom to manage my infrastructure from anywhere straight from my phone without trusting third-party cloud relays.
I built VPSPilot as a native Kotlin Android SSH client for my own daily workflow. A few things I focused on:
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Zero Proxies / Direct Connection: No middleman servers or cloud accounts—your phone talks directly to your own hosts over standard SSH.
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Hardware Key Isolation: SSH private keys are locked inside Android’s hardware-backed Keystore/TEE chip so they aren’t exposed or handed over to anyone else.
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Task Automation & Secret Handling: Automates my routine sysadmin tasks and custom workflows so I don’t have to keep typing repetitive commands on a phone keyboard, while keeping secrets from being typed raw into the console.
AI Disclosure: Built by me as a solo project for my own daily server management workflow. I drove the core architecture, handled all testing, and managed the device/Keystore implementation, while using an AI assistant for syntax help, debugging routine exceptions, and cleaning up documentation.
Good onya, but I’d suggest that stronger config management (e.g. ansible) would be more robust than what appears to be a library of macros.
Though anyone inclined to ansible would already be doing it, so your app is easier to sell to those who are scared of ansible.
Thanks! Yeah, if you’re already on Ansible that’s the better tool for a fleet, no argument. This is more for people with 2 or 3 VPSes who want to fix something quickly from their phone. The workflows aren’t just blind macros though: they check the current state first, show the exact commands, test configs (like sshd -t) and snapshot files so you can roll back. But “easier for people scared of Ansible” is honestly a pretty good description of who I built it for 😄
This is just worse Termius
Fair take for the terminal side, Termius is really polished. The part I built it for is the workflows plus undo for config changes, which Termius doesn’t do. Appreciate you looking anyway.
Who uses SSH clients that must connect through cloud servers? Why would somebody make that?
ConnectBot already exists and is free and open source and well tested and has all of these features.
No cloud at all actually, it connects straight from the phone to your server, same as ConnectBot. ConnectBot is great and I used it for years. What I wanted on top was the guided stuff: it shows the commands before running them, and snapshots config files so if I break sshd from my phone I can undo it. Totally fair if a plain terminal is all you need though.
