Blink Shell, Build & Code

I have been on a months-long quest to find an acceptable terminal app that I can actually own instead of rent. Unfortunately, every other option I tried (Termius was second-best) has dealbreaking flaws of one kind or another. Blink does not. It has flaws, but no dealbreakers. It also has several excellent and very useful day-to-day features that no other terminal app I have tried manages to implement all at once, and a few really good UI ideas I've never seen in a mobile terminal before. It's *relatively* stable for a mobile terminal app, the screen drawing issues aren't *usually* bad enough to force me to close the app and start over—a low bar, but no other app consistently meets it. And it feels and works remarkably like a NORMAL TERMINAL instead of somebody's fever dream of what the Terminal of the Future should be. The business model disgusts me. The *instant* I hear of an acceptable mobile terminal with an ethical business model, I will switch. I really hope I can do that before I need to pay next year's terminal rent. Two stars.

This app is my favorite SSH and Mosh client. I appreciate the local Unix utilities it provides and the fact that it looks and behaves like a terminal emulator. The visual minimalism by default is excellent. My one issue is with the recurring subscription model. I would rate it five stars if there was a one-time purchase option (even if it was per device — I’d happily pay $5-10 per device I needed Blink on). It makes it hard to recommend to interested friends or colleagues when there isn’t a free option or a one-time purchase option. Thankfully, I was grandfathered into the Blink Legacy pricing (which offered a one-time purchase). Please bring one-time purchases back!

I like the app and what it does. And I don’t really have a problem with a yearly subscription of $20 for the full version, I am not against subscriptions per se. I am also ok with the free version being limited in some way (including by a nag-screen) - that is after all how you evaluate before purchasing. But I have to say, the way that the developers have implemented the nag-screen to upgrade is a first for me. So much so that this is the first review I have ever made in the AppStore and this nag-screen implementation has turned me off the app so much that I will not be subscribing. This may not be a problem for everyone. But saying “there is a nag-screen, no big deal” does not give the full picture. They are transparent that the nag-screen will come up “up to a max of 3x per day”. What they don’t say is that there is a timer on the nag-screen that interrupts what you are doing for a significant time: 20seconds perhaps? Worse, if you “shake your device to fill this up quicker” the timer is supposed to be shorter but there really is not way to tell if that is so. As long as it counts down clearly, 5 seconds I could live with. Maybe even 10. But the timer as it is is just too random and long - and being asked to “shake to fill” is just juvenile… If the developers do not want to limit the app in other ways (only offer a subset of features?) my suggestion is to change that timeout to allow a limited “give me 5min” holds before it is forced (I would not be happy if I had a time critical situation and being forced to pause for 20sec). And rather than a “shake” prompt, my $0.02 is to just change it into a “take a break, it is better for you anyway” count down the seconds message…