Pocketty launches iPhone SSH terminal with sealed push alerts for blocked agents

According to the Show HN post, the developer built Pocketty during the latter half of a recent paternity leave and has used it for the past couple of months. The developer wrote that the app lets them remain productive without being at a desk, including during nap traps.

The app connects to a computer directly over plain SSH. Tailscale is described as the easy way to reach a host from anywhere, but any reachable SSH host works. On the host, a small Rust daemon watches herdr. When a pane needs the user, the daemon seals the alert to the phone's key using HPKE with X25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305. A stateless relay on Cloudflare Workers passes the sealed bytes to Apple Push Notification servers, and a notification extension opens them on the phone. The relay cannot read the alerts and keeps nothing, according to the post.

The SSH key is made in the Secure Enclave and cannot be exported. The terminal uses libghostty-vt for state and draws with wgpu on Metal, so full-screen terminal user interfaces look as they do on a desk, albeit narrower. Diffs for each agent turn, a file browser, and previews of localhost development servers started by the agent are available through the same SSH connection. No port forwarding is required.

herdr and the daemon are optional. Without them, Pocketty works as a normal SSH client. There is no account to set up, and the app has no analytics or tracking, the post says.

Pocketty offers a 14-day free trial with full feature access. After that, the developer says it can be purchased forever with a one-time payment: $99 for the first two weeks as a launch promotion, then $129. The developer added that they are happy to answer questions about the sealed push setup or running libghostty on iOS. At the time of the post, the Hacker News entry had 7 points and 0 comments.