Remote Desktop for Mac: Control It from Your iPhone

Not a viewer. Your fingers on the Mac's pointer, keyboard and scroll wheel, from wherever your iPhone is.

You actually drive it

Every input your Mac understands has a way to send it from the phone: a pointer you drag like a trackpad, the full keyboard including Escape and modifier keys a software keyboard normally has no room for, a joystick for moving the cursor a few pixels at a time, and a scroll wheel. Control & zoom puts your fingers directly on the Mac rather than on a picture of it.

If you only want to watch, Observe mode shows the same screen and sends nothing at all, which is the other half of "remote desktop": sometimes you want to drive, and sometimes you just want to see what a long build or a render is doing without touching anything.

Any screen, any app, any window

Share a whole display, one running application, or a single window, and switch between them without reconnecting. The list is live and includes apps that are installed but not running yet: tap one and the Mac opens it, then it is a source like any other. Every one of your Spaces is shown too, as a picture rather than a row of names.

A picture that keeps up

The bitrate follows what the connection can actually carry, stepping down when latency rises and back up when it settles, so a remote desktop session degrades gracefully instead of freezing. Pin it yourself to Low, Medium or High if you would rather decide. Pinch to zoom into a toolbar too small to tap from full view, and your touches still land in the right place once you are zoomed in.

Locked down the way a remote desktop should be

Each device makes its own encryption key and keeps it in its own Keychain: there is no account, and nothing about the session is stored on a server. Ask for Face ID every time the app comes back, so a locked phone is the only thing that unlocks the Mac. Details on exactly what that protects are on the Privacy Policy.

Beyond the screen

One clipboard between the two devices, in either direction. A screenshot of the session handed straight to the share sheet. Picture in Picture, so the Mac's screen stays with you outside the app, plus a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and a Home Screen widget. Ask Siri to connect to a Mac without unlocking the phone and finding the app first.

Set it up

Install Peering on the Mac, grant the two permissions it needs, and pair your iPhone. The full pairing guide walks through all three parts, or just get the Mac app and follow along in the app itself: