Mobile Terminal

As many jailbroken iPhone owners already know, the classic MobileTerminal app has not been updated to support iOS 8. Fortunately, developer lordscotland took the time to fork the original terminal emulator. This project has resulted in MTerminal, which provides command line access to iOS directly from the home screen.

MTerminal is packed with features, making it a robust solution that takes advantage of the iOS touch screen. The app is also optimized for larger displays, such as those found on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. A variety of gestures are supported, for example tapping on the edge of the terminal window emulates an arrow key in the appropriate direction.

Yay! No more annoying process to add MobileTerminal to your iPhone. An iOS 5-compatible version of the popular terminal tool has been added to Cydia. MobileTerminal is an iPhone version of the Mac OS Terminal utility that allows you to change your root password, or SSH your device. Installing MobileTerminal to your iPhone originally required a long process, but now it is one easy tap away.

MobileTerminal makes it possible to run utilities such as OpenSSH right from your iPhone, and it allows you to run system administration tasks from anywhere. It's a great and necessary tool for jailbroken iPhones.

Whether your iPhone is jailbroken or not, a decent SSH client can be useful to access other machines on the go. Jailbreakers can use an SSH app to browse and manipulate files directly on their Phones from the iOS command prompt. A popular app, Mobile Terminal serves this purpose but can't be installed directly from Cydia in iOS 4 or 5.

There is a workaround to install Mobile Terminal which is great because it's free. If you're looking for an easier alternative, Prompt comes to us from the App Store and can be installed on jailbroken or non-jailbroken iPhones.

Accessing your iPhone filesystem directly with a command line console can be convenient and makes it possible to run utilities such as OpenSSH without the need to buy separate standalone clients. The MobileTerminal app has been around for some time and provides this functionality to jailbroken iPhone users. Unfortunately, the latest version of MobileTerminal available in Cydia crashes in iOS 4 and iOS 5.

The app is still available and easy to install, without having to manually decompress archives or copy files directly to your iPhone. The easy way to install MobileTerminal in iOS 4 or iOS 5 doesn't even require a computer. Follow these steps directly on your jailbroken iPhone to install a working copy of MobileTerminal: