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.
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.