ConnectBot

ConnectBot is one of the oldest open-source SSH clients for Android, maintained by Kenny Root; on Google Play it has more than five million downloads. Version 1.10, in April 2026, rewrote the whole interface, and 1.11, in October 2026, added Mosh.

Connections

• SSH, Mosh and telnet, plus a local shell on the phone itself (the plain Android shell, not a Linux environment).
• Jump hosts: connect through one or more intermediate servers (ProxyJump).
• Port forwarding: local, remote and dynamic (SOCKS), set up per host.
• Agent forwarding, off by default, with an option to ask for confirmation each time.
• Stay connected: an option to reconnect when the connection drops. A notification keeps sessions running in the background, and Keep Wi-Fi active is on by default.
• Post-login automation, new in 1.11: run a sequence of prompts, inputs, delays and port forwards after logging in.

Keys and passwords

The key manager generates RSA, ECDSA, Ed25519 and DSA keys, RSA 2048 by default, and imports existing keys from a file or the clipboard. RSA and ECDSA keys can also be kept in the phone’s secure hardware and unlocked with your fingerprint; those can’t be exported or backed up. Login passwords can be saved per host, encrypted with Android’s keystore. The app itself can be locked with your fingerprint or PIN.

The terminal

Terminal profiles combine colours, font, size and character encoding. 1.11 added inline images in the iTerm2 and Kitty formats, off or on per profile or with consent for each session, better rendering of emoji, Arabic and other complex scripts, and switching between sessions from within the console again. With a hardware keyboard, the number keys can send F1 to F10 together with Shift.

What goes online

Only the servers you connect to. The developer’s privacy policy: “OSS Builds (e.g., GitHub): These builds contain no telemetry or tracking. No data is ever transmitted from these builds to the developers or any third-party analytics services.” We found no update check or analytics in the app; links to the project’s website, GitHub and donation pages open in your browser only when you tap them.

Android’s system backup includes your host list by default; private keys are left out unless you turn on their backup in the settings.

About this file

• This is the developer’s own build of version 1.11.1, the open-source (“oss”) build from the project’s GitHub releases (13 October 2026), signed with the ConnectBot release key from 2008. On 15 October F-Droid offered 1.11.0, one release behind. The builds marked “Untested” on GitHub after 1.11.1 are automatic pre-releases, which we don’t host.
• 1.11.1 adds a screen for viewing, importing and removing trusted host keys, a log of the app’s recent exit reasons, a profile setting for whether bold text uses bright colours, and ECDSA keys for agent forwarding. It also fixes a series of crashes, among them one in the session picker when several connections use the same saved host, and now rejects jump-host chains that loop or are too long.
• 1.11.0 also fixed lost characters when typing Korean (Hangul) and other IME problems, fingerprint-protected RSA keys on servers that don’t list their signature algorithms, and importing host lists from some file managers; it brings back the optional Page Up and Page Down swipe.
• Known open issues include the Enter key sometimes not responding after switching between several sessions (#2252), and automatic reconnection giving up after a DNS error (#2297).
• The 13.1 MB file runs on Android 7.0 and later, on ARM and x86, 32- and 64-bit. Of its 12 permissions, notifications are the only one the app asks for while running; it also declares nearby Wi-Fi devices, which we found no use of in the code.
• The screenshots are the project’s own: the host list and the btop system monitor running on a server.
• ConnectBot is licensed under the Apache-2.0. Its telnet code is under the GPL-2.0 or later, and the Mosh libraries, from the project’s mosh4android repository, under the GPL-3.0. The source of this version is at https://github.com/connectbot/connectbot/tree/v1.11.1.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).