Someone plugs in the HDMI cable. The room's display shows nothing, or shows 1024×768, or shows the desktop of whoever presented last week. After a minute of this, somebody says "just share your screen", and out comes AnyDesk or TeamViewer.
It works. It is also the wrong shape for the problem, and noticing why turns out to be more interesting than it sounds.
What remote desktop tools are actually for
AnyDesk, TeamViewer and RustDesk exist to solve one problem well: reach a machine you are not near. Your parent's laptop. A server in a rack. A colleague's desktop three time zones away. Everything about their design follows from that.
One person connects to one machine. That person takes the mouse. The remote screen is mirrored to them, and the whole session is framed as control — because when you are not in the room, control is the only way to do anything.
Being fair about the privacy question, because it is the claim people reach for first and it is wrong: AnyDesk has a LAN mode, and in it a session goes directly between the two machines without the internet. RustDesk can be self-hosted entirely on your own infrastructure. Neither of these tools forces your screen through somebody's cloud if you configure them not to. If you have read that they do, that is not accurate.
The mismatch is not privacy. It is shape.
The relay, the account and the NAT traversal are not overhead — they are the product, and they are what makes reaching a machine in another country possible at all. Standing beside the machine, you pay for all three and use none of them.
Where the shape stops fitting
Stand in a room with four people and a Mac, and three things go wrong at once.
It is one-to-one. Remote desktop is a session between two endpoints. Four people looking at one screen is not what it models, so three of them read over a shoulder.
It mirrors, and mirroring is sometimes the wrong answer. Every tool in this category shows a screen that already exists. But the meeting-room problem is often the opposite: you want a screen you do not have — somewhere to put the thing you are talking about while your laptop keeps the notes. No remote desktop tool creates a display, because from three time zones away that idea makes no sense.
Control is the default, when nobody wanted control. Handing over the mouse is the whole premise. In a room, everyone wants to point at something and one person occasionally wants to click.
What else is out there
Honestly, and including the ones that do the job better than we do.
| What it is | Account | Cost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sidecar | Apple's own. iPad as a real second display, mirror or extend | Same Apple Account on both | Free, built in |
| Apple Screen Sharing | Mac to Mac over the LAN, built into macOS | Local account on the target | Free, built in |
| Deskreen | Open source. Streams a screen or one window to any browser on the LAN | No | Free, AGPL-3.0 |
| AnyDesk | Remote desktop, LAN mode available | Yes for most use | Free tier capped at 3 devices |
| TeamViewer | Remote desktop, LAN mode available | Yes for most use | Free personal; commercial use cuts sessions at 5 minutes |
| RustDesk | Open source remote desktop, self-hostable | Optional if self-hosted | Free |
| Duet Display | iPad as a second display, wired or wireless | Yes | Paid |
| Luna Display | iPad as a second display, via a hardware dongle | Yes | Paid + hardware |
If you have an iPad and a Mac and both are on your Apple Account, use Sidecar. It is free, it is built in, it extends rather than mirrors, and it is genuinely good. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
And if you want no account at all, look at Deskreen before you look at us. It is the one on that list closest to the same argument — free, open source, local network, nothing to sign in to, and the viewing device needs no app because the viewer is a browser tab. It is 21,000 stars and still shipping; v3.2.16 went out in July 2026. For getting a screen onto the other devices in a room it is an excellent answer and it costs nothing to try.
Where it differs is the same line the rest of this post is about. Deskreen streams a screen or a single window into a browser, so what the iPad shows is a picture of something the Mac was already displaying. It cannot give macOS a display that is not there — a browser tab is not a monitor the window server can place windows on — which is the thing that decides whether you are mirroring a screen or gaining one.
That distinction is worth being precise about, because "second screen" gets used for both and they are not the same feature.
Sidecar stops being the answer when the second screen belongs to someone else — a colleague's iPad, a client's iPhone, a device that is not on your Apple Account. That is a different problem, and it is the one we were trying to solve.
Where ours sits
ExtendPilot is built for the room rather than the continent, and the design falls out of that in three ways.
Several people watch at once. Everyone in the room joins the same screen. They can point at it, draw on it, and react, all at the same time, each in their own colour. Only one person can be handed the pointer, and that is a deliberate grant the presenter makes and takes back by touching their own mouse.
It can extend, not only mirror. It creates a display that macOS treats as real hardware — arrangeable in System Settings, HiDPI, windows move onto it. That is the part remote desktop tools structurally cannot do, and it is also why it cannot be in the Mac App Store.
No account, and no server in a session. Devices find each other with Bonjour and connect peer to peer. There is nothing to sign in to, and a session works with the router unplugged. Not as a policy — there is simply no infrastructure in the path to send it through.
It is free. The Mac app is a notarised download from extendpilot.com, or brew install vishwas3000/tap/extendpilot; the iPhone and iPad app is with App Review.
When not to use it
Worth saying, because a comparison that recommends its author's software in every case is not a comparison.
- You are not in the room. Use AnyDesk, RustDesk or Screens. Ours needs both devices on the same Wi-Fi and offers nothing over the internet.
- You need unattended access to a machine nobody is sitting at. Not a thing it does. MeshCentral or RustDesk.
- You want to share from Windows or Linux. Sharing is macOS only. Watching will come to Android; sharing will not.
- Both devices are yours and on one Apple Account. Sidecar is right there.
The useful question is not which tool is best. It is whether the thing you are doing is remote at all — and in a meeting room, it usually is not.
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