Free SSH client
for Android.
Save a server once, open a shell in a tap, and keep it alive while you do something else on your phone. Kammel is free and open source — no account, no cloud, no paid tier holding a feature back.
A real terminal, not a text box
Kammel ships a full xterm emulator: 256 colours, the alternate screen buffer and mouse reporting, so vim, htop, tmux and full-screen TUIs render the way they do on a desktop instead of collapsing into garbage.
Programmable key rows
Ctrl-C, Esc, Tab, arrows and pipes as tappable keys — plus any command you add yourself. Reorder them, resize them and page through as many rows as you need.
Sticky Ctrl and Shift
Arm a modifier, then press the next key. It is the combination a soft keyboard cannot otherwise produce, and it is what makes a phone shell usable.
Pinch to resize
Two fingers scale the terminal font live, and the size is remembered. Scrolling and text selection keep working untouched.
Sessions that survive the lock screen
A native Android foreground service keeps the process and every open shell running while the app is in the background — the same mechanism Termux uses. Switch to your browser, take a call, come back to a build that is still going.
Terminal tabs
Several SSH sessions at once, each with its own shell, working directory and status. Tap to switch, double-tap to rename.
One-tap reconnect
When a connection drops, a strip appears over the terminal. One tap re-establishes the session and brings back exactly the tunnels that were up.
Keys and passwords stay on the device
There is no Kammel server, so there is nothing to breach. Passwords and private keys are encrypted in the Android Keystore via EncryptedSharedPreferences — never in plain text and never in a config file you might sync somewhere by accident.
Host key pinning
A new server is confirmed once and pinned. A key that later changes blocks the connection instead of shrugging it off — the classic man-in-the-middle signal, taken seriously.
Real SHA256 fingerprints
Fingerprints are OpenSSH-format SHA256:… strings, byte-for-byte what ssh-keygen -lf prints, so you can compare them against the server you control.
Generate a key on the phone
Create an ed25519 pair on the device and copy the public half straight into a server's authorized_keys. No laptop in the loop.
SFTP and a code editor in the same app
Every file operation runs over SFTP on the session you are already connected to — no second app, no syncing a copy down first. Open a source file, edit it with syntax highlighting, and save straight back over SFTP.
Full remote explorer
Navigate the server, create, rename, delete, multi-select, copy and paste, with live filtering for the directories that hold three hundred entries.
Viewers built in
Read PDFs, render Markdown, view images and SVGs, and play video or audio without leaving the app.
Port forwarding, Docker and git
The parts of the job that usually send you back to a laptop are in the app: all three OpenSSH forwarding modes with live byte counters, a Docker console for containers, images, volumes and Compose, and a git panel that drives the repository where it actually lives.
Questions
Is Kammel really free?
Yes. Kammel is free and open source under MIT and GPL. There is no account, no subscription and no feature held behind a paid tier — you get everything by installing the app.
Which Android versions are supported?
Android 8.0 and later. There is also a Linux x86_64 desktop build from the same codebase.
Where do I download it?
From GitHub Releases. The APK is published there for every release, and the app can check for and install updates itself from the same feed.
Does Kammel work without an internet connection to your servers?
Kammel needs network access to reach the machine you are connecting to, and nothing else. It makes no other outbound traffic — no account check, no analytics, no crash reporting.
Free, open source.
Keep reading
Android Terminal Emulator with SSH
A full xterm terminal for Android: 256 colours, alternate screen buffer, mouse reporting, sticky modifiers and programmable key rows. Free and open source.
JuiceSSH Alternative for Android
JuiceSSH was unpublished from Google Play in December 2025 and last updated in 2021. Kammel is a free, open-source, actively developed replacement for Android.
Termius Alternative: Free and Open Source
Kammel is an open-source SSH client for Android and Linux with no account and no subscription. How it compares to Termius, and where Termius is the better fit.
Run Claude Code on Android over SSH
Drive Claude Code and other TUI coding agents from your phone over SSH. Agent notifications, a prompt library, dictation and screenshot upload over SFTP.