Apple Remote Desktop App Reviews

Somehow, I missed the part about “best way to manage machines on your NETWORK” and thought this would allow me to provide remote support for another machine (my mother’s). I realized my mistake as soon as I installed and opened it up but it was ALREADY TOO LATE to get my money back! It’s ineligible for a refund, even 2 minutes after purchase. I’ve complained to the Apple Store. Will take this review down or revise as appropriate if I can find some resolution with them. Note to others that there is a free app called Team Viewer that allows remote support for machines that are not on your network.

It looks like Apple rolled the owners (who paid bigger $$$) into this 3.8, MAS only upgrade. ARD has always been VERY useful for managing many Macs inside a LAN. Good to see an old but still quite relevant tool get some Yosemite love.

So many things fixed! As a School Sysadmin this is such a refreshing update! * Refresh rates are back at acceptable levels * Monitoring of 10.8-10.10 clients is now usable * UI is now in line with the rest of the OS Some improvements yet to be made: * Let clients on a Subnet be dynamically added to a multi-monitoring window as they come available. I have 400 client laptops that are always going up and down on my Student network, I want to have them come up in a multi-monitoring window when they open their laptop and go away when their laptop closes. It’s 2015, students now have BYOD programs in schools and need to be monitored. * Let me monitor iPads and other iOS devices! Even if it’s just showing the active app and a screenshot. This requires an update to the iOS device but would be so important in the classroom. * Allow me to be notified when a client has their Remote Desktop sharing disabled! * Let me run App Store Updates! This would be awesome in conjunction with the Caching service on Server.app That’s all I can think of, thank you so much for giving ARD some attention!

When I started using ARD 3.8 it was like the ARD of old. Everything started working as it should and its quite fast now to perform tasks. Anyone who previously had issues (like us) should immediately update both the Admin and client side. The interface takes a little getting used to and I’m not a total fan of it, but more importantly it just works and works very well. This software went from absolute junk to well worth the money in one update. I’m glad Apple has listened to all the complaints about ARD and fixed all the major issues. I’m an Apple Administrator for a school district and this is an absolute awesome app to manage your Macs, even ones in a remote location. I use it to monitor Macs, help people out remotely, push updates (awesome for updating Flash & Java in a lab), push UNIX commands, update the OS, etc, etc. Its an extremely useful tool if you’re managing a lab of Macs, or just a lot of Macs in general.

Shortly after upgrading to the 3.6/.7 versions of ARD, I often yelled in frustration at what felt like a certain other computer company’s product, not one of Apple’s. ARD 3.8, finally, addresses the speed and function issues we’ve been griping about since then. Apple has made ARD fun to use, again and made mine and many other Mac Admin’s jobs easy, again. Bravo, Apple for giving back my confidence that you really do care about the enterprise side of the Mac!

This is the worst remote desktop application I have ever used. It keeps hanging whenever I open. I have no clue on what is happening. Please take this down and do some work before getting into app store.

I had to downgrade to ARD 3.7 on my Maverick users so they could screen share. Something wrong with ARD 3.8 clients for the moment with Screen Sharing via Apple’s Messaging application.

I was looking for an alternative to LogMeIn Pro to support a couple of elderly friends over the internet, as well as to manage my family’s computers in my home what I decided to check out ARD. I am so glad that I did! I am also able to use it as a backup to LogMeIn Pro on a few other systems I support across the globe. The access to the systems is clean and direct. So happy I purchased this!

We use this to administer and monitor our children’s iMacs (all runing El Capitan). We are also connected through an Apple wireless Time Capsule Airport router. It works perfectly. There is a little setup to do on the clients being monitored. Compared to administering say Windows and Linux, this application makes the task _extremely_ easy. It is clear what is being done. There is good documentation too.

The App opens and appears to work but to do anything with it you need to create a client installer, every time I try to make one I get a message saying “An unexpected error occurred: the required components were not found. The Application appears to be installed incorrectly.” After reinstalling it I still got this message. I looked around the web for possible solutions and quickly discovered that several people have this same issue. Apple appears to take the position of pretending there is no issue and refuses to address it in any way, despite the number of people complaining about this. As it stands now, this app is totally unusable.

Does not work, client installer does not create. Don’t waste $80 on this - go somewhere else for Mac management.

At approaching over a year old, this application is rendered totally useless with the most current OS X El Capitan update. How can a company that produces their own OS and remote tool not have at LEAST A F’ING UPDATE!!!!! On a side note, now I am unable to remotely manage or create a client installer for my company’s MACs. The cool thing, now I get to lose weight by visiting all 2000 devices manually. Thanks APPLE. You took my $79.99 and ran….

I have made multiple attempts to resolve the failure of this tool to create a client installer, wasted many hours with Apple technical support, and multiple ‘experts at the genious bar but nobody at Apple seems to know how to solve the issue of the application failure to create a client installer. This bug has been around for years and Apple is ignoring the issue and not fixing it. This is the first negative review I write about an Apple product, but this product and the lack of technical support for it deserves it.

Brand new mac mini with the latest updates, and ARD is not able create a client installer. Can not use the application at this time.

Unfortunately a documented bug with client distribution package persists. You cannot create a standardized client install package, stuck with manually configurating clients. Per tech support hope for a fix with future releases.

Disclaimer: I haven’t any interests which render the following as ‘Marketing’ : Three Mac Minis, two MacBooks, three iMacs, two HP printers, and seven iOS devices wireless networked by Airports. ARD is exactly the package I needed to manage my family’s computers. All my Apple installs whether new device or application, have honestly been, “it just works”. I’ve had to call Apple a few times for help to fix something. In every instance but one (a faulty Mac Mini headphone jack) , the fault was my own. Information systems folks seem to blame-game sometimes - trapped by their confirmation bias - to be fair, some are hammered by it as well. Point is, value the rating as you’d value the rater.

As a product it’s solid and well integrated with Mac environment. All specific shortcuts and features are working. No VNC or other software can compare to ARD (I tried). However, there is one big disadvatage comparing to Windows world - ARD is way too slow. When you’re working with Windows machines via RDP you can work near the same speed as if you were sitting in front of that machine. Mac to Windows, Windows to Windows, Ubuntu to Windows all work great via RDP. ARD is 100 times worse. Even when I’m sitting in the same room with the machine being controlled via ARD (same WiFi point) I’m getting very low performance. This is huge disadvantage. You can do basic things, but you can’t work remotely.