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Pocketty

iPhone SSH terminal that pings you when an agent is blocked

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This is 1 of 37 launches in mobile developer and terminal clients — see how it stacks up on momentum and crowding →

212 other launches read as similar to this one →

Details

External ID
50009634
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Pocketty
Website domain
pocketty.app
Launched
Oct. 8, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
32
Upvotes percentile
0.74
Tags
—

Description

Hello~! pocketty is an SSH terminal for iPhone and iPad, made for herdr. herdr keeps your agent panes alive on your computer and knows the state of each one: working, needs you, or done.I made this in anger/desperation for the latter half of my recent paternity leave. Nap traps are sweet, but there's only so much doom-scrolling and movie-watching I can handle... In any event, I've been using it for the last couple months and no longer have to be my desk anymore to be productive. Now the nap-traps are still productive (when i want them to be) !How it works:- The app talks to your computer directly over plain SSH. Tailscale is the easy way to reach it from anywhere but any SSH host you can reach works.- A small Rust daemon on the host watches herdr. When a pane needs you, it seals the alert to your phone's key with HPKE (X25519, ChaCha20-Poly1305). A stateless relay (pocketty's) on Cloudflare Workers passes the sealed bytes to APNs (Apple Push Notification servers), and a notification extension opens them on the phone. The relay can't read them and keeps nothing.- Your SSH key is made in the Secure Enclave and can't be exported.- The terminal uses libghostty-vt for state and draws with wgpu on Metal, so full-screen TUIs look like they do on your desk, albeit narrower.- Diffs for each agent turn, a file browser, and previews of `localhost` dev servers your agent starts, all through the same SSH connection. No port forwarding to set up.herdr and the daemon are optional. Without them, it's a normal SSH client.There's no account to set up and no analytics or tracking in the app. The app runs a 14-day free trial, with full feature access. Then, if you're as happy as I am with it, then it can be yours forever with a one-time purchase: $99 for the first two weeks (launch promo) then $129 after that.Happy to answer anything about the sealed push setup or running libghostty on iOS.

Enrichment

Niche
mobile developer and terminal clients
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
AI feature
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
ios ssh terminal with alerts for background agents
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While an iOS SSH client is standard, maintaining reliable background daemon connections, detecting terminal agent completion states, and delivering push notifications requires specialized daemon architecture.

What it would actually take: Requires a native Swift iOS app implementing terminal emulation (e.g. SwiftTerm) and SSH (Libssh2), paired with a background desktop daemon (Go/Rust) monitoring tmux/pty sessions. The desktop daemon must monitor process lifecycle or terminal output heuristics and trigger APNs (Apple Push Notifications) when an agent blocks.

Discussion

9 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: herdr-web-ui, Tailscale

Concerns raised: False 'herdr is not installed' error upon connecting, Inability to scroll inside herdr session, $99 pricing relative to buggy experience

Feature requests: Optional iCloud Keychain sync for SSH keys

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 212 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #83 of 213 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 338 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product