Tailscale raises $100M

Unfortunately despite claiming that they would, they've never allowed their iOS application to allow configuration of the control server (every other client they have released does). Maybe some more funding will allow them to focus on the client quality.

also, their iOS client still has abysmal background battery usage even when not connected. It has been more than a year now, so, yes, seeing them improve in such areas would be cool.

But given the huge amount of money invested, pressure will go into other directions. I'm afraid my (aside of the iOS issues) beloved Tailscale is on a path to expensive enterprisey bloat, losing what made it so good (the JSON based ACLs, the external authentication provider reliance, etc - GitHub Auth is a killer-feature for me for example)

(Tailscale engineer here)

That's https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1572 which we haven't given up on. It's just not done. We did it for macOS and we thought the same thing would've worked for iOS (they share ton of the same code) but it apparently didn't work.

The mobile apps have been a low priority thus far. We just recently hired some people to work on them, though.

The highest priority for them currently is fixing battery life (we do some dumb things when LTE + wifi are both available, and when using exit nodes, and some unnecessary heart beating that sucks on mobile) and then there's also a mobile app redesign (or just "design" coming).

We like Headscale and we're super glad that it exists. (they saved us some work by doing it first, as our control server wasn't in a releasable state) We keep Juan et al updated when there's protocol changes or things they can do. (e.g. recent https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/issues/552)

About the battery usage: what I can’t explain is that there’s a lot of background energy usage on iOS when Tailscale is running even when it’s not connected.

If this was about heart beating, I would expect that to only happen when the client is connected.

Also, in the battery stats, the background usage is there and tailscale is listed, but with - % of battery usage.

However, when I force quit tailscale, all of the background energy usage goes away.

Thanks for the response. I had misinterpreted the communication from Tailscale to be adversarial rather than just that it wasn't something that had engineering focus. It's good to hear that there will be some progress towards making the mobile app better.

A lot of it was because we were using the cell radio when wifi was available.

Have you tried 1.24.2 that's just as of yesterday on the App Store? It fixes one of the worst of the offenders (but not all yet).

In any case, we understand a lot of the problems now and plan to work on it soon.

This is 1.24.2 while the phone was connected to my charger over night

https://i.imgur.com/hQU6Orz.jpg

Tailscale app not force quit but also not connected

Any chance to be able to get the dmg directly from Tailscale vs the App Store? It's been a pain on MacOS as not everyone wants to mix personal accounts with corporate laptops