JuiceSSH just took away my paid features and vanished

June 3, 2026

I noticed today while using JuiceSSH on my phone that certain features that I’d been using fine for the past couple of months suddenly disappeared. The standard free vs. pro dialog showed up, so I hit the “Already Purchased” option, thinking it would just check with the Play Licensing API/server.

Verifying purchase screenshot

But that didn’t work, and I assumed it was some licensing bug. Sometimes, the Play Licensing API will figure out that you already own the item if you try to purchase it, so I clicked on “Purchase”, only for the Play dialog to tell me the item was “no longer available”.

Google Play dialog saying item not available

According to Reddit, JuiceSSH has been delisted from the Play Store since December 2025, because it hasn’t been updated for quite some time. From what I can tell, the last release was back in 2021, so it’s possible that Google just removed it because the developer was no longer pushing updates. If you are an Android developer, you’ve probably received those emails from Google to bring your apps “into compliance” with the updated policies or risk having your app be taken down.

This sucks, because I’ve been happily using JuiceSSH in a pinch and the premium features have been useful for me. You shouldn’t be able to take away a paid product from users, but that is effectively what has happened here. Because the server that does the licensing checks have been pulled, I can no longer use the features that I paid for.

And it seems I’m late to realizing this, since there are Hacker News threads and Reddit discussions about this debacle from months ago:

I wish the developers released one final update, perhaps to remove the licensing check if they can no longer keep the server running, or even open-source the app if they can’t be bothered to do that. But instead, they’ve just quietly pulled the listing and all of their websites:

Apparently, there are ways to patch the licensing checks out with projects like this, but said project requires Xposed and I don’t really want to modify my phone just to get a potentially insecure app running again.

This really doesn’t help with the reputation of paid Android apps. At least on Apple’s App Store, unless the app does something really weird with licensing and server-side checks, paid delisted apps can generally be re-downloaded and used as it was when it was published. Sure, server-side features would no longer work, but since the app checks licensing through Apple’s App Store, paid features would continue to work.

What pains me is that this is also possible on Android. Your app could just do the license checks client-side, but that’s not what the developers of JuiceSSH chose to do, hence the breakage.

OK, but now we’re past that and have to move to an alternative. Termius seemed okay, but I don’t like that it’s not open-source, and I’m wary of paying for another app that might rug-pull me like JuiceSSH did in the future.

The next best alternative seems to be ConnectBot, which seems to check all the boxes I need and had on JuiceSSH. No Mosh support, but there’s some activity in this PR so I’m quite hopeful it’ll be supported soon. It’ll be an afternoon moving over all of the host configuration and key pairs, but at least I only have to do this once and never again since ConnectBot is open-source!

To round off this post: pretty annoying, Paul and Tom Maddox should be ashamed of themselves, but at least there’s an alternative available.