Tailscale Reviews

- on demand fails me so often I can no longer TRUST it. It simply fails to run. Or gets STUCK. Why have this totally broken feature? It’s not reliable.
- the new widget is WRONG most of the time. It’s beyond useless. It shows off right now but Tailscale shows on.

At a service level, tailscaled, has also failed me numerous times with dead connections.

Every time I mention these problems to other people they wonder why I bother using Tailscale or service.

With how popular this is and how much money they must bring in I am confused why the BASIC FUNCTIONALITY is broken.

Great idea. Great when it works. Bad maintainers.

To whoever reads this: please fix this stuff and prove me wrong.

Tailscale and service are great functionally, but there’s currently an issue with Tailscale on IOS devices causing Tailscale to consistently drain battery life 24/7 regardless of whether you’re actively transferring data through the mesh network. Leaving my phone unplugged with a full charge at night with Tailscale running will drain the battery by 10-30% in 7 hours. Battery drain without this app installed is <10%. After checking the this app forums this seems to be a common and unresolved issue. Until it’s resolved it’s just not practical to use Tailscale on a daily basis.

The networking aspect of Tailscale is exactly what you’d expect, it functions great. The problems are with the interface itself.

The main toggle switch has poor state management and often displays “needs authorization” when it is just waiting for the network on a cold start, for example. It also lacks support for switching between multiple accounts.

This is a feature on the desktop clients and it makes it difficult and time consuming to have to purge my session entirely and re-auth everytime I want to switch organizations, since I use TS at work and personally as well.

Please address these issues as soon as possible if you are not already. I believe they are most certainly a common frustration for regular users.

Tailscale is not bad. It does allow me to connect to my mesh, but I’m deducting a star for the inability to set the exit node. Literally spent hours trying to find something that is on every other device before deciding that they just don’t have the support for iOS. The docs would suggest that the feature is there, but we can’t find it.

All major issues have been addressed, including vpn on demand. This is great. Everything is functional. I am leaving this at 4 stars for now because the battery life drains are still unknown with this version. I am still using raw wireguard because it uses less than 1% battery per day, while this app can use anywhere between 7-15%. Perhaps this app being too chatty and updating the local state might have something to do with it? This product will be the best in the world if battery usage can be optimized.

I like the simplicity of Tailscale and how the UI looks and performs. I like that I can use the iOS shortcuts app to automatically turn on when I browse the web or open other apps on my phone but I loose like 50% of battery within 2 hours of it on and would not like to be near a charger or have to purchase a battery bank to keep using this service. Great service overall though.

I’m running the latest iOS and sometimes I’ll notice conductivity isn’t working through this app. When I open my phone up, I tap on this app app it says loading… then connectivity works. So the VPN isn’t always connected. This bug should probably be fixed or looked at. It is intermittent, but frequent enough to be noticed.

App has definitely gotten better with updates and so I’m thankful for that. Not that long ago I had to force quit Tailscale a few times to finally get it to connect and not give me re-auth errors. However, battery life and management is still a very very big deterrent to using this how I originally wanted to, which is always-on, using my pi-hole server for DNS and ad blocking. I’m following the issue in GitHub. Please please fix! Many users seeing the same thing and providing dumps. If you guys can get the battery usage under control then Tailscale will be UNSTOPPABLE.

this app is absolutely wonderful. A fantastic product with a well thought out user experience. I’m a super fan.

Unfortunately on iOS, the application often disconnects from the VPN and you need to reopen the application to reconnect throughout the day.

I use geotriggered automations on my iPhone to connect and disconnect. I’ve noticed that if an exit node is enabled in the iOS app, then while the automations do succeed, they *report* failure. If no exit node is enabled, then these false alarms do not occur.

As a former IPsec user, Tailscale makes remote access and routing so much easier. I see where all the hype comes from. I was leery at first but I should have switched long ago.

Excellent performance with my home Linux server acting as an exit node to my home network. It just works and even has a kill switch if connectivity suspends. Was very easy to setup

Feature request: Add an app settings for theme with three options: Light, Dark, System Setting. this app uses system preferences to toggle dark mode. Unfortunately, visionOS doesn’t have this setting so Tailscale defaults to light mode.

Other than this minor gripe, this app is amazing. I use it to remote into my home computers from anywhere in the world and with an exit node, I can access all of my favorite streaming apps.

I had tried to use the WireGuard app before, and it was just too much of a hassle, this app is so much more user friendly and works really cleanly on my Linux devices and iPad.

Anyways I saw this with a few amount of reviews and thought I should help out a little.

For everyone complaining about battery usage it only happens if you leave the VPN on (I saw ~20-40m/hr background activity which was 1-3% of battery) however if you turn off the switch in Tailscale there is no background usage.

this app is an incredible service that keeps getting better. The iOS UI in version 1.46 got a much needed overhaul, and it looks GOOD. Leaving on all the time does cause an increased battery drain, but that is the only detractor to this app, and it’s certainly no worse than other VPN options

Would appreciate a Shortcuts integration to change the DNS settings. In my current country I have to turn my exit node and DNS settings off/on together to access certain services, and I would rather make a shortcut to do both, but currently shortcuts only supports enabling/disabling exit nodes.

This is how you write software. Perfectly executed. When you choose to obfuscate something excellent like Wireguard you better have UX experts around or you’ll embarrass yourself. See what TrueNAS Scale did to ZFS (they embarrassed themselves). This on the other hand is how it’s done. Take something amazing like Wireguard and make it simple and intuitive without sacrificing the goodness of the obfuscated software and you have this app. Well done.

I love this app. It makes it super easy to securely access all my devices from anywhere across my private network and cloud-top instances. Easy to set up, just sign in and away you go.

My only ask is that the team add a widget to enable/disable this app with a single tap. There are times I need to turn off the VPN (e.g. playing a game on my iPad) and it would be nice to have a one touch way to do that!

Thanks for making such a great product!

Seriously, it feels like the Internet and having fun with computers is a thing again thanks to how easy this app makes it to host things securely!