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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Tailscale on iOS has always been highly unreliable for me, while the regular Wireguard app just works.

Interesting! I use it only occasionally, but I don't leave the connection on. I only turn the iOS Tailscale connection on when I need to access resources behind Tailscale.

Are you having issues with it when it's always connected?

It randomly and frequently turns off, then the connected services of course no longer work, then you turn it on manually, they still don’t work, then you hard kill safari a few times and/or toggle it on and off and it eventually works. On Linux or Windows the client is rock-solid however.

Meanwhile with wireguard: It just works. Every time. Every where. Unless someone blocks UDP.

I have a hub and spoke wireguard nerwork that has been working somewhat perfectly for years, but there always are a couple of servers that just dont want to play nice. They connect to the hub, all good, and after a few minutes/hrs connection drops and handshakes fail. Using wireguard-go on docker (older linux machines) for all of them. Its a pain.

> Tailscale on iOS has always been highly unreliable for me

Its better than it used to be.

But the fundamental problem is that the Wireguard app is a simple GUI around `wireguard-go` built as a static C library via cgo. But Tailscale uses a fork of `wireguard-go` and then adds control client, DERP, NAT traversal etc. on top of it.

So there's quite a lot of "bloat" on top of the Wireguard code in Tailscale iOS and therefore your problem might not be Wireguard vs Wireguard implementation question but something happening elsewhere in the Tailscale code.

In what way has it been unreliable? All of my self hosted services sit on my local network with access provided by Tailscale. I navigate to the address and they just work.

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