A reason why I like to buy my music (it’s mine forever, dammit and don’t want it to go away) Not a fan of subscriptions and limiting ‘lifetime’ licenses. I do miss the ability of iTunes storing away your apps in a folder to restore on another device. All we are doing is “renting” things in the end (except for purchased music at least).
Jump Desktop is worth every cent, and it’s a one-off purchase, not a subscription (I’ve been using it for years with no additional cost except for the initial purchase). It works on the local network and over the internet with no issues. It even has some unique features, like the ability to stream audio.
I had been a Screens user. For whatever reasons eventually I was not able to use Screens when being outside the home (may have been an issue on my end) and I tried Jump Desktop. That was back in 2021. Since then, I have been using Jump Desktop exclusively to connect to PCs, Windows Servers and my Macs from my iPads, my iPhone, my Macs and my PC. No issues at all, it just works out of the box.
Great - thank you for the feedback! I’ll keep an eye out on sales for Jump Desktop as Screens currently still works for me (except on my new iPad of course). One use case I’m thinking of for Jump Desktop is if it would allow me to install and use it within Parallels VM on my Mac for Windows(?). Wondering if this would be a better “native” Windows experience instead of just looking at my Mac display with the Parallels window on top to navigate within. Kind of a frustrating experience with Screens in navigating Parallels on my Mac. Thanks.
I have stopped using Parallels some years ago, so I feel not 100% comfortable in answering your question, but given my Parallels experience before the Apple silicon era, I would differentiate between two different use cases:
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You are accessing your Windows VM from the Mac that is running the VM: no, I do not think that this will be a better “native” Windows experience.
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You are accessing your Windows VM from a different device than the one running the VM: yes, of course you can install Jump Desktop Connect on your Windows VM () and connect directly to it from any device. Is this a better experience in comparison to connecting to the remote Mac AND accessing the VM via Parallels (so basically connecting to the Mac running the VM)? Maybe, maybe not, depending on the issues you have.
Before spending any money: Just try it. You can use it for free for 14 days on your Mac - just download it from https://jumpdesktop.com
This is the scenario. Thanks for letting me know about the free trial. I only have 1 Mac so I would have to buy the iOS app to truly test it out, but I have a Windows laptop laying around so I installed on both (the VM on Mac, and the Windows laptop). It works perfectly… exactly the kind of experience I was looking for in accessing and navigating around my Parallels VM. Works so much better than trying to do it via Screens (though I haven’t tried the Screens app on Windows … never had luck trying to get that to work on my Windows laptop so gave up on that long ago). Looks like Jump Desktop is where I’ll land once Screens stop working for me (maybe sooner if the price comes down anytime soon). Thanks for the help!
Installing a remote access tool inside Windows itself (such as the Jump Desktop tool) works better for accessing a Windows system (real or virtual) from a Mac for me.
I found I have more adjustment of the virtual screen size and resolution options in the Jump. Desktop client than the settings in Windows itself.
Might be my rusty Windows skills, but I always get greyed out options in Windows saying I can’t change the font or scaling modes, but I get around it by changing the settings in the Jump Desktop client instead.
Apologies if these solutions have already been provided. The thread went off on lots of other tangents and my eyes started to glaze over.
On your device, go to Appstore → click on your account icon top right → Apps → My Apps → All
Search for Screens. It will still be there with the little cloud download icon. It still works great on my iPhone 16 and iPad mini 7.
This is also a good time to have the “iMazing Talk”. Every iPhone/iPad user needs to own iMazing. Don’t think about, just do it. One of the millions of reasons is for cases just like this. Why would you trust Apple to store your purchases forever? With iMazing, you can download the .ipa file directly to your mac and store it, reinstall it, etc.
Well that’s bizarre - when I initially setup my new iPad mini 7 (which I’m a big big fan of in comparison to my heavy 13” iPad Pro), that did not work for me (was nowhere to be found including going back in time with my purchases). But I do it today per your instructions and there she is! Can’t explain it … maybe some kind of sync with my account needed to finish with iCloud(?) … haha … no idea, but will chalk this up to “user error” I even found another one of my missing apps this way, but still a handful of others that just will not show (even though I use on my other devices just fine). Looking at AppRaven (very handy app by the way), these missing apps of mine were all removed from the App Store within the past year or so (including Screens 4), so not sure why this particular one will show to download but not the others - weird.
Regarding iMazing, I did use that app about 10 years ago (I had it licensed) and it worked perfectly for this use case at the time. I thought things have significantly changed regarding both licensing and App Store restrictions with this method, but it sounds like it all still ‘just works’. So maybe I’ll look into it again if I really want those missing apps. The licensing was a bit confusing when I briefly looked at it last week because I remembered using it before for this purpose (I’m sure my original license will not work anymore). Thanks for the suggestion.