HOW TO Access your Mac with Chrome Remote Desktop

1 Get the extension

To use Chrome Remote Desktop, first install the Google Chrome browser and then use it to visit remotedesktop. google.com/access. You should now see the screen above: click on the blue download button to continue.

2 Name your Mac

In order to connect to your Mac it’ll need to have a new name. You can stick with the suggested name here (which is what we’ll do), or you can give your Mac a different name. This will be what appears in your other devices’ apps.

3 PIN protect it

You now need to create a PIN, which needs to be at least six digits long and shouldn’t be easily guessable – so ‘123456’ is a no-no. This, in conjunction with your Google account, will prevent other people accessing your Mac.

4 Give Google access

You’ll now be asked to give appropriate system access to Google’s app, and it’ll tell you exactly what you need to do. First of all, we need to enable ChromeRemoteDesktopHost in the System Preferences Accessibility panel.

5 Enable screen capture

The next thing Chrome will ask you to do is to tick the button next to ChromeRemoteDesktopHost in System Preference’s screen-recording settings. This is so Chrome can stream your Mac’s display to your other devices.

6 See your status

Once you’ve done all that, you’ll be able to return to the Chrome browser where you should see something like the above (but with your Mac’s name in the headline instead of ours). If it says ‘online’, you’re good to go.

7 Get the app

If you connect from another Mac, you just need Chrome with the Remote Desktop extension, but for iOS you’ll have to install Chrome Remote Desktop from the App Store. Use the same Google account to log in as you did with Chrome.

8 Pick your Mac

Tap on the Mac you want to use – right now it’s the only on-screen option, but the app can store multiple Mac and PC details. After a few seconds you should see your Mac desktop. Tap the blue icon at the bottom right.

9 Set the size

If you don’t tick Resize Desktop To Fit in the app’s Settings, you may find your touch control (or trackpad, if you choose that option) isn’t happening in the right place. We’ve also found that multiple monitor setups can be tricky.

10 Move around

The app uses touch mode by default, enabling you to pinch and swipe to zoom and move. Here we’ve doubletapped on a Desktop folder to open it in the Finder. Now, let’s open a document on the Mac from our remote iPad.

11 Open an app

Above, we’ve selected a Pages document, and you’ll see it’s opened up normally in the app – we’ve got our toolbars and all the bits of the document present and correct. We’re now controlling Pages with our iPad.

12 Get things done

While we’re viewing and interacting with this document on an iPad, the app is running on our Mac and the file is on that Mac’s SSD. Anything we could do on our Mac, we can now do from our iPad.