SillyTavern without Termux

Termux is a real terminal on your phone, and the SillyTavern project documents it properly. It is still six commands, a Node.js toolchain and a session that Android is free to end. If that is the part you want to skip, this page is about the alternative.

1.Can you run SillyTavern on Android without Termux?

Yes. Install an Android app that carries a compatible server inside it, and the whole terminal step disappears. PokiTavern does exactly that: it embeds a server implementing the SillyTavern 1.18 API and serves that project's official frontend, so the server is already listening when the app opens.

You are not giving up the phone-does-the-work property either. The inference engine ships in the app, so replies can be generated on the device with no account and no network.

2.What does a Termux install actually ask of you?

Six things, none of them hard on their own, which is why the total gets underestimated. Following the official guide:

1. Sideload Termux from F-Droid or GitHub. The Play Store build is no longer maintained, and the guide says so.
2. Switch package mirrors with termux-change-repo, then run pkg update && pkg upgrade.
3. Install a toolchain: pkg install git nodejs-lts nano, plus esbuild on 32-bit devices.
4. Clone the repository with git clone and wait for npm to resolve its dependency tree.
5. Start the server with bash start.sh and copy the printed address into a browser.
6. Do step five again every time the server is gone.

Step six is the one that wears people down. The other five happen once.

3.Why does the server stop when you switch apps?

Because in Termux the server is a process inside a terminal session, and Android treats that session like any other app. When the system needs memory it can end the process, and the server goes with it. Reboot the phone and nothing brings it back; you open Termux, change directory and start it again.

The official guide stops at bash start.sh and points to further reading for staying alive across all that. It is solvable with wake locks and startup scripts, but solving it is more terminal work, not less.

4.What replaces it

An ordinary APK. You install it the way you install anything outside the Play Store: open the file, allow installs from your browser once, done. PokiTavern requires Android 7.0 or newer and version 1.1.2 is 202 MB, which is large because the app carries the LiteRT inference engine, four Qualcomm NPU backends, the runtime for three CPU architectures, the SillyTavern frontend it serves and the seed content it starts with.

The language model is not in that 202 MB. On first run you choose one in the app and download it once: Qwen3 0.6B at about 614 MB, Gemma 4 E2B at about 2.59 GB or Gemma 4 E4B at about 3.66 GB. They are free, they come from public Hugging Face mirrors, and you can paste the URL of any public .litertlm file instead. After the download, airplane mode changes nothing.

Hosted models stay available. Point the app at OpenAI-, Claude-, Gemini- or OpenRouter-compatible endpoints, or at a local one such as Ollama. You supply the key, it stays on the phone, and the bill goes to that provider rather than to us. Chats, cards and settings sit in a SQLite database on the device, and LAN mode lets any browser on the same Wi-Fi use the phone as the server.

5.What PokiTavern does not implement

Some server-side modules are deliberately absent rather than faked. Server plugins do not load at all. AI Horde and NovelAI as backends, Stable Diffusion image generation, speech synthesis and recognition, expression classification, image captioning, vector storage and web search are all unimplemented. Those endpoints answer honestly, so the frontend degrades cleanly instead of misbehaving, but the features are not there. PokiTavern is also Android only for now, and not on Google Play yet.

These are our gaps, not a property of any particular install method. If you need one of them, what you need is the upstream SillyTavern server, which runs on a PC, a home server, or on the phone through a terminal. The three ways to run SillyTavern on Android compares those routes.

6.Do your characters come with you?

Yes. A PNG character card stores its JSON inside the image's tEXt chunk: V2 under the chara keyword, V3 under ccv3, with V3 taking precedence when a file carries both. PokiTavern reads both, as SillyTavern 1.18 does, so a card exported from a Termux install imports without conversion. World books move the same way.

7.Questions people ask

Do I have to uninstall Termux first?

No. They are separate Android apps and neither touches the other's files, so you can keep the Termux install until you are satisfied with the replacement. Export the character cards you care about before you remove anything, since a PNG card is the whole character.

Does it work with no internet connection?

Yes, once a model has been downloaded to the phone. The inference engine is already in the app, and the model comes down on first run from a public Hugging Face mirror. After that, replies are generated on the device and airplane mode makes no difference.

Is it free, and is there a message limit?

Free, with no subscription, no message quota, no account and no telemetry. If you attach your own API key to a hosted model, you pay that provider directly at their prices. Nothing bills through PokiTavern, because there is nothing to bill through.

Is this a fork or a copy of SillyTavern?

Neither. PokiTavern is an independent server that implements the SillyTavern 1.18 API, and it serves that project's official frontend on top of it. The two projects are not affiliated and SillyTavern has not endorsed this app.

When is the iOS version coming?

It has not shipped and it is not on the App Store. The waitlist on the home page is the only notice we send, and the address is used for nothing else. Android 7.0 or newer is the only supported platform today.