Help
Requirements, fixes and a person to write to. For step-by-step walkthroughs, the guides are the better place to start.
Before you install
Mochitao connects to a machine you already own. Check these three things first.
You have a machine to connect to
A home server, a workstation, a cloud VM — anything reachable over SSH. Mochitao does not give you a shell on the phone itself, and it installs nothing on that machine.
You can already log into it
From a computer, over SSH. If you cannot yet, the problem to solve is on that machine first.
Android 8.0 or newer on arm64, or iPhone on iOS 17 or newer
On Android that is nearly every phone made since about 2016. The Android build is arm64 only, so it will not install on most x86_64 emulators.
Troubleshooting
It will not install on my emulator
Expected: the Android build is arm64 only, so an x86_64 emulator image has no native library to load. Use a physical device, or an arm64 system image.
The connection says it is connecting, forever
Either the network is slow or nothing is listening on that address and port. Check that a computer on the same network reaches the same address and port, and that sshd is running.
It asks for a password every time
That is what an empty password field means: you asked to be prompted. Save the password on the host, or switch to a key — the first-connection guide shows how.
The host key changed and it will not connect
That is the screen doing its job. A changed key can mean the machine is not the one it claims to be. Find out why it changed, then forget the old key from that host's own sheet and reconnect, comparing the new fingerprint with the one on the server.
My session closed while the app was in the background
Check Settings › Session & battery › Keep session in background. The phone itself may also end a very long background stretch. Either way the tab comes back as a card, and one tap reconnects it.
Vietnamese input goes in wrong, or the grid misaligns
Both are meant to work. If input is wrong, make sure a Vietnamese keyboard is selected and let the word finish composing. If a line misaligns, note the exact line and send it to us: that is a defect we can fix.
How do I move to a new phone?
Export a file from Settings › Backup & import › Backup & restore. It carries everything except passwords and private keys, so on the new phone you import it and then generate or import your keys again.
I use Herdr and see no agent states
Herdr is optional and runs on your host. Either it is not installed there, not running, or has no session yet. The app tells you which. Everything else works without it.
Still stuck?
Write to the address below with what you did, what you expected, and what happened instead. If there is an error on screen, its exact words are the most useful thing you can send. A person reads every message.
Mochitao has no analytics and no backend, which is why there is no live chat here.