Feature Request: Use Live Activity to maintain a remote connection

[josephschmitt]

One of my favorite features of other SSH clients on iOS/iPadOS is their use of Live Activities. When enabled on a Profile, it’ll start a live activity when I connect to a server which maintains the connection active until I manually kill the activity or disconnect from the server. This helps avoid some of the disconnect/reconnect issues that can happen when the app gets backgrounded and the connection is broken.

[kitknox]

Have you tried the location diary mode with the auto setting. This automatically enables location services and keeps TCP based sessions active. It is smart enough to detect if you are using UDP based sessions like mosh and tssh and in those cases doesn't enable location services unless there is a tab with TCP based flow open.

I would highly recommend checking out tssh in KCP mode. The latency will spoil you and you will never be able to go back to anything else.

(See other threads where surviving app termination for tssh currently requires my special fork of tsshd, but resuming as long as the app hasn't terminated will work as-is)

[kitknox]

With that said I do like this idea still, and it lays the foundation for enabling widgets as well.

[josephschmitt]

@kitknox I can’t seem to get it to work right, it seems to constantly disable itself. I also just liked that with a Live Activity I knew for sure it was still running in the background and had an easy way to kill it and tell it to stop.

[kitknox]

Live activities as far as I can tell have no way of keeping the process running so this can just be a visualization for the location diary. Playing around with some options though.

[josephschmitt]

@kitknox hmm I thought that’s what Termix was doing, but maybe I misunderstood. Their implementation of it works great for me, but maybe it’s an illusion. Worth checking out at least.

[kitknox]

I was curious so I took a closer look. Termix has a background audio entitlement in their Info.plist, and when backgrounded is generating what appears to be silent audio to keep themselves alive.

AudioStateSnapshot: BtState PoweredOn Route Speaker App app.termix.Termix, Score 201, Remote -1 NumofApp 1

Fill your device logs in the background if you look. Apple has historically rejected apps for doing this if their is not a clear end user activity that is generating audio (listening to music, podcast, etc.)

    <key>UIBackgroundModes</key>
    <array>
      <string>remote-notification</string>
      <string>audio</string>
    </array>

They just happen also have the option of showing a live activity.

[awahlig]

The only other idea I had was the BGContinuedProcessingTask added in iOS/iPadOS 26. Main use case are apps like video editors which need to continue working in background on a task initiated by the user. However, the docs say that the app is expected to report on progress and eventually finish the task so it might not be a good fit for ssh.

Also, I’m actually quite satisfied with the Location Diary feature. I configured it in System Settings to only provide an approximate location which I hope makes it more energy efficient. It’s been solid.

[kitknox]

The other option is I can write a Network Extension which AFAIK runs in its own process space. From what I understand Apple carefully reviews this entitlement, but the justification would be also for the background tunnels/port forward feature so that you can port forward things that work in the background ie dev test your website in Safari and not have the tunnel go away. At this point it could also keep the direct TCP connections open and then proxy them back to the app as needed.

It’s a fair bit of work if its all to get rejected at app review though. I could also basically be a VPN over SSH provider.

This may only be worth it if Apple starts to no longer allow this location services path.

[awahlig]

Yes, Network Extension would be ideal but I agree, with the current workaround being effective, it's not a big enough gain for how much work/hassle/uncertainty it is.

Going back to the subject of Live Activities, knowing that they wouldn't keep the app running in background, should adding them still be considered or should this be closed as "won't fix"?

I guess in a sense, an open session is a live activity, so maybe it could act as a reminder? Personally I don't feel like that would be very useful.

[kitknox]

The notification only version of this is technically inside build 26, but unreachable because I feature flagged the setting in the settings view that allows you to turn it on until I decide what to do here. The initial version I created mirrors the auto mode of location diary and presents itself at the same times as location services. Think of it as a glorified version of the blue location dot.

[chrisintheshell]

Termius is doing something similar by enabling Location Tracking (https://support.termius.com/hc/en-us/articles/900006226306-Keep-your-Termius-sessions-alive-in-the-background).

I think using the verbiage Location Diary is a little confusing and some people may not know what it's used for. Also, maybe using different descriptions under mode would help clear things up a bit. Based on the description I would think location tracking should auto start when I start an SSH session using the native SSH client/server ($ ssh name@host), but it does not appear to work. I can only seem to get it working if I have Location Diary Mode enabled and mode set to "Sessions Only".

Also it requires me to re-enable the Location Diary Mode each time I start rootshell. Is a possible to setup a privacy setting that allows it to be used indefinitely?

[kitknox]

OK that was the clue I needed, the root cause for those of you have trouble in auto mode is that sessions started from the local shell are being treated as local and not SSH in the view of the location diary. If you launch the seasons via profiles, quick connect, etc directly into a tab or split the feature appears to work correctly. (Or have at least one launched and connected that way.)

Next build will have a fix for SSH sessions launched via iOS local shell. Alternatively you can force it on as you noted with session only, but that turns back off on the next app launch.

[kitknox]

@chrisintheshell Your issue should be addressed in build 27 that went out.

[josephschmitt]

I was definitely envisioning the Live Activity being a type of reminder that the session is still running in the background. If that's actually happening via location diary I think that's fine. What would be extra nice is if I manually quit a Live Session it immediately kills that running background session.

No idea if this is actually possible, but it would be a nice way to control backgrounded sessions if it is.

[awahlig]

I tested it on both build 26 and 27 and can confirm that it’s fixed in 27.

With Location Diary in Auto mode, ssh sessions started from the local shell don’t trigger the diary feature in build 26 but they do in 27.