Shell Drop FAQ

Shell Drop is optimised for iOS 26 and AI agent operators. Agents do the work now; you steer them. It may feel different because the app houses a soul. It speaks to you.

In our own personal testing, we found Wispr Flow to be the best voice-to-text keyboard for agent terminal work. It's not perfect, but it is the best. Click here to use our Refer a friend link. Full writeup: Willow Voice vs Wispr Flow.

Shell Drop is free. Every feature ships in the app. There is no subscription and no account. If you choose the Groq voice engine you bring your own key; the on-device engine costs nothing.

Shell Drop is native on iPhone and iPad, including iPhone Duo, folded or open. A macOS app is coming soon. Full support on iPad includes the 13-inch iPad Pro and hardware keyboards, with Magic Keyboard trackpad scrolling.

Yes. Shell Drop has full iPhone Duo support from version 5.2.2, folded and open. On the open Duo the app runs edge to edge on the inner display with a font picked from the window width, and on the foldable's outer screen everything stays centred and clear of the status bar column. Shell Drop on iPhone Duo has the details.

Yes. Shell Drop is a native terminal emulator for iPhone, iPad and iPhone Duo, with a real SSH client underneath. It renders full terminal output, supports Nerd Fonts, and attaches to tmux sessions on any Mac mini, VPS or box you can SSH into.

Yes. SSH into the Mac Mini from your iPhone or iPad, attach to the tmux session running Claude Code, Codex, Grok, Hermes, OpenClaw or opencode, and steer the agent from the terminal. See Claude Code on iPhone and the Mac Mini agent OS guide.

Yes. Vertical swipe scrolls history. Horizontal swipe changes sessions. Tab names sync from tmux on their own. Sticky Ctrl, Esc, arrows and a detach control sit on the toolbar.

Tmux scrolling needs mouse mode enabled on the server. Add this line to your ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g mouse on

Then reload it with tmux source ~/.tmux.conf, or restart tmux. Single-finger scroll through your scrollback will work after that. (This is a tmux setting, not an app setting, so it has to live in your server's config.)

In the iOS Keychain on-device only, protected by the Secure Enclave. Passwords do not sync via iCloud. Connection metadata syncs via CloudKit; credentials do not.

TOFU (Trust On First Use). The first time you connect to a host, Shell Drop pins its public key fingerprint. If the key changes on a later connection, Shell Drop blocks the session and surfaces the mismatch.

An opt-in toolbar button that fires your favourite command from the toolbar. Yours to customise. Useful for firing strings like update memory at a running coding agent (for example, MemPalace on Claude Code) without typing on a phone keyboard. Off by default.

Yes. Generate Ed25519 keys or hardware-backed keys in the app via Apple's Secure Enclave, the dedicated security coprocessor built into every iPhone and iPad chip, or paste-import your existing OpenSSH keys. With Secure Enclave the private key never leaves the chip. Pick password or key per saved connection. Passphrase-protected keys need the passphrase removed before import.

Quick Drop pins one saved connection to the Home screen for one-tap launch. Long-press the Quick Drop card to swap which connection it points to.

A view of your live SSH sessions as droplets. Tap one to focus it and jump straight into that session. Open it from the keyboard toolbar or the Launchpad.

Yes. The paperclip button on the keyboard toolbar is on by default and toggles off in Settings. Pick a file from Files, or a photo or video from your library, and Shell Drop uploads it to the connected server over SSH and drops the remote path at the prompt. You choose the upload size limit. Settings goes from 100 MB to 1 GB, and if a file is over, Shell Drop offers to raise it on the spot.

Your keystrokes, toolbar taps, pastes, and any dictation text you accept, sent over the same SSH shell you opened. Paste an image or attach a file and Shell Drop opens a second channel on that connection, uploads it to a /tmp/shelldrop- path on your server, and types the path at your prompt; the file sits in /tmp until your server cleans it up. The only command Shell Drop ever types on its own is an optional tmux attach after you relaunch and restore a session, on by default and toggleable in Settings. Server-initiated clipboard writes need a separate setting, off by default. Nothing else rides the connection: no telemetry, no third-party servers, and your keys never leave the device.

Tap the Ctrl key on the keyboard toolbar, then press the next key. Ctrl then C sends Ctrl-C, Ctrl then B sends Ctrl-B (the default tmux prefix), and so on. The modifier applies to a single keypress and then clears.

Yes. Tap and hold anywhere on the keyboard toolbar to enter edit mode, drag any button to a new position, then tap Done. Your layout is saved and persists across sessions.

Version 5.2 (9 October 2026) makes live activities more reliable and SSH connections more efficient, especially when reconnecting or restoring tabs. Recent releases added One Tap server connect and a one tap paste key (5.1.9), and live activities for your agents, snippets and Siri (5.1.7). Full per-version history at the release notes page.

Yes. Saved connections sync via iCloud. Passwords and private SSH key material stay on-device. No third-party cloud involved.

Yes. Background sessions keep running while you use other apps. Toggle in Settings if you want to turn persistence off.

Shell Drop is a standard SSH client. MoshDrop was a separate Mosh protocol client; it was discontinued in April 2026. Shell Drop covers the core SSH workflow with its own background keep-alive.

Yes. A dedicated selection mode button, plus long-press to select a word. Links in terminal output open with one tap.

Yes. Hardware keyboard input is supported. On iPad, the Magic Keyboard trackpad scrolls the terminal with standard two-finger gestures.

No analytics, no telemetry, no third-party SDKs. Connection data stays between your device and your server. See the privacy policy for details.

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