A Category That Time Forgot
Open any "best remote desktop software" list from 2020 and compare it to one from 2026. Go ahead, we'll wait.
Same players. Same interfaces. Same "create account, install agent, log in, connect" flow that hasn't fundamentally changed since TeamViewer launched in 2005. The screenshots might show a darker UI, maybe a redesigned sidebar, but the architecture — the way these tools work — is frozen in time.
This isn't because remote desktop is a solved problem. It's because the incumbents have no incentive to reinvent themselves. They've built profitable businesses on subscription revenue and enterprise contracts. Innovation is a risk; the status quo is a cash flow.
Meanwhile, every other productivity tool has been rebuilt from the ground up. Note-taking got Notion. Design got Figma. Coding got Cursor. Communication got Arc. These tools didn't just iterate — they rethought their categories.
Remote desktop is overdue for the same treatment.
What's Actually Changed
Hardware codecs are everywhere now
This is the biggest technical shift. In 2020, hardware H.265 encoding was a high-end GPU feature. In 2026, every laptop, phone, and tablet ships with hardware encode and decode for H.265 and AV1. Apple's M-series chips can encode 4K HEVC faster than you can blink.
This should have made remote desktop dramatically better. For most incumbents, it hasn't — because their architectures were designed around software encoding and can't easily take advantage of hardware pipelines.
Network infrastructure leveled up
5G is genuinely good now. Wi-Fi 7 is rolling out. Starlink covers most of the planet. The average connection quality in 2026 is what only fiber users had in 2020. The network is no longer the bottleneck — the software is.
AI entered the chat
This is the one everyone talks about, but few have shipped meaningfully. AI in remote desktop could mean intelligent frame prediction, bandwidth-adaptive streaming, automated resolution scaling, or even understanding what the user is trying to do and optimizing the pipeline accordingly.
Most incumbents have added "AI" to their marketing pages. Few have integrated it deeper than a chatbot in their help center.
What Hasn't Changed (And Should Have)
The account problem
Every major remote desktop tool still requires creating an account, verifying an email, and in many cases adding a credit card before you can connect your own computer to your own phone. This is absurd. Your devices are on the same network. You're physically holding both of them. Why does a company in another country need to be in the middle of that transaction?
The bloat problem
Install TeamViewer on a Mac. Watch Activity Monitor. 400MB+ of RAM for an app that's mostly idle. Multiple background processes. Auto-update daemons. Telemetry. The app is doing more work existing than most apps do while actively running.
The privacy problem
Every connection routes through the vendor's servers. Your session metadata — when you connect, how long, which devices — is logged, stored, and in many cases analyzed. Some vendors explicitly state they may share usage data with third parties. For a tool that literally sees your entire screen, this should be alarming.
The platform problem
Most cross-platform remote desktop apps are Electron wrappers or web views. They look the same on every platform because they are the same — a Chrome tab in disguise. They can't access platform-specific hardware acceleration. They can't integrate with system-level features. They're guests on your device, not citizens.
Where Remio Fits
We didn't set out to build "another remote desktop app." We set out to answer a question: What would remote desktop look like if you designed it today, with no legacy constraints, using today's hardware?
The answer we arrived at looks very different from the incumbents:
| Traditional | Remio | |
|---|---|---|
| Account required | Email + password | None — PIN pairing |
| Rendering | Electron / Web | Native (Metal / Vulkan) |
| Connection | Via vendor servers | Peer-to-peer when possible |
| Data collected | Usage analytics | Nothing |
| Memory footprint | 300-500MB | ~45MB |
We're not claiming we're better at everything. The incumbents have features we don't have yet — file transfer, multi-monitor support, enterprise admin consoles. They have years of edge-case hardening.
But we believe the foundation matters more than the feature list. And our foundation — native code, hardware-accelerated rendering, peer-to-peer connections, zero data collection — is fundamentally different from anything else in the category.
The AI Question
We get asked about AI constantly. Here's our honest answer: we're building AI features, but we're building them for the right reasons.
AI-powered frame prediction that reduces perceived latency by pre-rendering likely screen regions? That's meaningful. AI bandwidth optimization that adapts encoding quality in real-time based on network conditions? That directly improves the user experience.
An AI chatbot that answers FAQ questions? That's a marketing feature, not a product feature. We're focused on the former.
What Happens Next
We think 2026-2027 is the tipping point for remote desktop. The hardware is finally fast enough. The networks are finally good enough. The user expectations — shaped by years of using beautiful, fast, native apps — are finally high enough that the old guard can't coast anymore.
Someone is going to rebuild this category from the ground up. We intend for that someone to be us.
"The best time to rethink remote desktop was five years ago. The second best time is now."