Mobile and Tablet
Use Subshell on a phone or tablet: the adaptive web shell, Add to Home Screen, and the native companion app.
The phone is one way in, not the point; the same instance you watch at the desk answers from anywhere. On a phone or tablet you have three things, in order of how most people use them: the same web UI, adapted to the screen; Add to Home Screen, which makes it a standalone app with notifications; and the native companion, which is a builder's project, not a store download.
Same URL, adapted shell
Browse to the address your desktop uses and sign in. The web UI reshapes itself: the sidebar becomes a drawer, a workspace's grid becomes tabs (one subshell at a time, finger-sized panes), and the terminal grows a key bar, because a touch keyboard has no way to send Esc, Ctrl-C, Tab, or arrow keys: the bar carries Esc, ^C, Tab and ⇧Tab, ⏎ and ⇧⏎ (newline), /, the four arrows, scroll-to-top/bottom, and an image-attach button. Everything else is the same pane you type into at the desk.
Getting the URL right is the networking page's job, not this one: a browser may sign in only from an address the instance knows, and it now knows its own, so a phone on your Wi-Fi signs in at the server's LAN address with nothing to configure. A name the machine answers to that is not one of its addresses (.local, local DNS) still needs an entry in the trusted-origin list; the 403 "Invalid origin" failure is diagnosed in Networking & Addresses, and the mesh networks under Network plugins are the durable fix.
Add to Home Screen: the install everyone should do
In the sidebar, the Subshell for Mobile dialog picks up from there: it lists every address this server accepts sign-ins from (its own, including the LAN addresses it discovers on its own interfaces, any you added under Settings → Networking, and every network it has joined) and puts a QR code beside the one you pick. Addresses a phone could never dial are not listed at all; if none is left, the dialog says so where the QR would be and names what to do. Then the install is one gesture, per platform:
| Platform | Steps |
|---|---|
| iPhone / iPad | Open the address in Safari (Chrome and Firefox on iOS can't install it) → Share → Add to Home Screen → Add |
| Android | Open the address in Chrome → ⋮ → Add to Home screen → Install app |
| Desktop browser | Chrome/Edge: the install icon in the address bar; Firefox and Safari on macOS offer no install, so use a bookmark or pin the tab |
The installed app opens fullscreen under its own icon, and on Apple devices it is how notifications arrive: iOS and iPadOS deliver web push only to an installed web app, never to a browser tab. (Desktop and Android browsers can push to a plain tab; the install is about the fullscreen shell there.) One caveat with teeth: notifications need a secure (https) address. Plain http://192.168.x.x:3080 still installs to the Home Screen, but iOS will never deliver a notification to it; publishing the server behind a network plugin's https address fixes both at once. Notifications covers the bell, the master switch, and which events ring.
The native companion
There is also a real React Native app in the repository, built with Expo, and to be honest about what that means today: it is a from-source project. The release pipeline publishes the server, the node CLI, and the two desktop apps; nothing mobile ships through it, and the app's own docs say push cannot even be end-to-end tested without your own EAS project and Firebase credentials. If you are evaluating Subshell on a phone, the Home Screen app above is the supported path.
What the companion adds, when built, is OS-level presence: push delivered with no browser in the chain, an app-icon badge, lock-screen actions, and a session credential kept in the Keychain (optionally gated behind Face ID) rather than in browser storage. It authenticates as the same kind of user your browser does (you type your server's address and sign in) and it shows the subshell list, the launch form, and a live xterm pane, with the same "who else is watching" device strip as the web. It is not a second web app and the app's docs forbid it from becoming one; it exists for those OS-level capabilities, no more.
See also
- Networking & Addresses: bind, base URL, trusted origins, the 403 by name
- Network plugins: Tailscale, NetBird, Headscale, Cloudflare Tunnel
- Notifications: the bell, delivery, and the owner-only rule
- Devices: what the device strip is and why the smallest screen matters
- Security model: the threat model on GitHub for the authority
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