The 20-Year Standstill
Open any remote desktop app in 2026. Now open one from 2006. Squint a little, and they're basically the same thing.
Sure, the icons are flatter. The connection might be slightly faster. Maybe there's a dark mode now. But the fundamental experience — stream pixels from machine A, display on machine B, send inputs back — hasn't meaningfully changed in twenty years.
The codec got better. H.264 replaced JPEG. Then H.265 showed up. Bandwidth got cheaper. Connections got faster. But the core architecture? The way these apps think about streaming? Frozen in time.
Every remote desktop today uses the same approach: encode a frame, send it, decode it, display it, repeat. The settings are mostly static. The quality is mostly manual. And when your network dips, the picture turns to mush until you drag a slider somewhere.
That's not a technology problem. It's an imagination problem.
Enter AI: This Changes Everything
Here's what excites us — and what keeps us up at night (in a good way). AI doesn't just improve remote desktop. It reimagines what remote desktop can be.
We're not talking about slapping a chatbot onto a settings panel. We're talking about fundamentally rethinking the streaming pipeline with intelligence at every layer.
Adaptive Quality That Actually Adapts
Current remote desktop apps give you a quality slider. Maybe "Auto" mode that picks between a few presets. That's it.
Now imagine an AI that watches everything in real time — your network bandwidth, latency jitter, packet loss patterns, what's actually on your screen, whether you're reading a document or watching a video — and continuously optimizes dozens of parameters simultaneously.
Text on screen? Crank up sharpness, lower the framerate. Playing a video? Flip to high framerate, accept more compression. Screen idle for three seconds? Drop to near-zero bandwidth. Fast scrolling? Temporarily reduce quality, then snap back to crystal clear the moment you stop.
A human can't do this. A simple algorithm can't do this well. But a trained model, running on-device, watching every frame? That's a different game entirely.
Super-Resolution: Send Less, See More
This is the one that blows people's minds when we explain it.
Gaming pioneered AI upscaling — NVIDIA's DLSS renders games at lower resolution, then uses neural networks with access to depth buffers, motion vectors, and dedicated Tensor Cores to reconstruct stunning visuals. It works beautifully because the game engine provides rich data the AI can leverage.
Remote desktop upscaling is inspired by this idea but faces a fundamentally different challenge: we work from compressed video frames without access to scene geometry or engine-level data. It's "blind" super-resolution — harder, but still powerful. Encode the stream at 720p and use on-device AI to reconstruct it toward 1080p or 1440p quality. The bandwidth savings are real, even if the approach differs from gaming.
The best part? This all happens on your device. No cloud processing. No data leaving your machine. Your Apple Neural Engine or Qualcomm NPU does the heavy lifting, and it barely breaks a sweat.
Input Prediction: Feeling Faster Than Physics
Here's a subtle one that makes a massive difference. Every remote desktop has inherent latency — the time between you moving your mouse and seeing it move on screen. Physics sets a floor: light takes about 20ms to cross the United States.
But what if the client could predict where your cursor is going? Mouse movements aren't random. They follow patterns — acceleration curves, target sizes, directional intent. A lightweight model can predict cursor position 16-32ms into the future with surprising accuracy.
The result? The remote desktop feels faster than the speed of light would allow. Not because we broke physics, but because we stopped waiting for it.
Why Nobody Else Is Doing This
We researched every major player. TeamViewer. AnyDesk. Splashtop. Parsec. Moonlight. Here's what we found:
- TeamViewer — Using AI for IT management dashboards and endpoint monitoring. Zero AI in the streaming pipeline.
- AnyDesk — No AI features at all. Still focused on traditional features.
- Splashtop — AI for automated patching and compliance. Nothing for streaming quality.
- Parsec — Acquired by Unity. Great low-latency tech, but no AI integration.
- Moonlight — Open source, excellent for NVIDIA users. No AI capabilities.
"Every major competitor is using AI for IT management — help desks, ticketing, compliance reports. Nobody is using AI where it matters most: the actual streaming experience."
This isn't a small gap. It's a blue ocean. The entire category is looking in one direction (enterprise IT automation) while ignoring the biggest opportunity (making the stream itself intelligent).
We think the reason is simple: doing AI in the streaming pipeline is hard. You need native code (not Electron) to access hardware accelerators. You need a custom rendering pipeline to insert AI processing without adding latency. You need to understand both ML inference and real-time video. That's a rare combination.
Why Remio Is Built for This
This is where our "crazy" decision to go fully native pays off in ways we couldn't have predicted.
Because we built Remio with SwiftUI and Metal on Apple, Jetpack Compose and Vulkan on Android, and native APIs on Windows — we have direct access to every hardware accelerator on every platform.
- Apple Neural Engine — 15.8 TOPS on M-series, available via CoreML. Perfect for real-time super-resolution.
- Qualcomm Hexagon NPU — Built into every modern Android chip. On-device AI without touching the GPU.
- Metal & Vulkan — Our rendering pipeline already runs on the GPU. Adding AI inference is a natural extension.
An Electron app can't do this. A web wrapper can't do this. You need to be native to talk to the Neural Engine. You need to be native to schedule ML inference between video decode and display. You need to be native to make AI a first-class citizen in the rendering pipeline — not an afterthought bolted on top.
Our architecture was AI-ready before we even started working on AI. That's not an accident. That's the advantage of building things the hard way.
What's Coming
We're not just theorizing. Here's what's on our roadmap:
Phase 1 (Now): AI adaptive quality — intelligent, real-time streaming parameter optimization based on network conditions and content type. No manual sliders. No "quality: medium." Just the best possible picture at every moment.
Phase 2 (Next): AI super-resolution — on-device neural upscaling that cuts bandwidth in half while maintaining visual quality. We're particularly excited about this one — we wrote a deep dive on how it works.
Phase 3 (Future): Predictive input, content-aware encoding, and things we're not ready to talk about yet. Let's just say the Neural Engine on your phone is about to earn its keep.
Every feature runs on-device. No cloud. No data collection. No compromise on the privacy principles that define Remio.
The Future Is Intelligent Streaming
We believe that five years from now, people will look back at today's remote desktop apps the way we look back at dial-up internet. "You just... sent raw pixels and hoped for the best? That's it?"
The future of remote desktop isn't faster codecs or bigger pipes. It's intelligence. It's an app that understands what you're doing, predicts what you need, and optimizes itself in real time — invisibly, privately, on your own device.
Nobody else is building this. So we are.
And honestly? We can't wait for you to try it.