Mobile support to flash via USB-C/Lightning dongles

balenaEtcher
1

I enjoy using the graphical Balena Etcher in a pinch to solve boot problems and rescue my servers. In fact, this is one of the last few tools that requires a traditional laptop/desktop devices to function.

I would like to perform more of my DevOps duties from a mobile device, as these have excellent battery life on the go. In fact, there are dongles available to manipulate disks on mobile devices. So in theory this is possible.

Could Balena please release ports for Android and iOS? So that we can continue to perform critical server maintenance functions without having to depend on access to a desktop or laptop.

4

Hey there @mcandre I’m with you, Etcher on mobile devices would be awesome. We’re keeping track of demand for this but usually the hang up is that the APIs available on these devices (iOS, at least, not sure about Android) do not facilitate block-level filesystem access to the attached disks.

One possible way around this is some kind of portable headless device that runs Etcher, which you can then control via a web interface from the mobile device, in theory it wouldn’t be too much to achieve but this is just an idea, nobody I know of is actively working on it yet. :slight_smile: