Back to My Mac is gone: what actually replaced it

If you set up a Mac before 2018, there is a good chance you used Back to My Mac without ever thinking about how it worked. You ticked a box in iCloud preferences, and your Mac at home simply appeared in the Finder sidebar of your Mac at work. Then one year it was not there any more, and the replacement never arrived. This is what it did, why it went, and what actually covers the job now.

The short answer

Nothing built into macOS replaced Back to My Mac. Apple deprecated it in macOS Mojave in 2018, switched the service off entirely on 1 July 2019, and pointed people at third-party alternatives rather than shipping a successor. Everything that fills the gap today is either infrastructure you run yourself, such as a VPN back to your home network, or an app from someone other than Apple. The built-in tools that remain - Screen Sharing, File Sharing, Apple Remote Desktop - all stop at the edge of your local network, which is precisely the boundary Back to My Mac existed to cross.

In practice that leaves four options, and the rest of this page walks through each one: a VPN back to your home network, a mesh VPN such as Tailscale, port forwarding on your router, or a remote access app that handles the networking for you. That last group includes Screens, Jump Desktop, RustDesk, AnyDesk and Servey, which is the app we make and which exists specifically because Apple left this gap open. We have tried to be straight about where each of the others is the better answer.

What Back to My Mac actually did

It solved three separate problems at once, which is why losing it hurt more than it first appeared. The first was discovery: it used your iCloud account to make your Macs findable from any network, effectively extending Bonjour beyond the local network it is normally confined to. The second was connectivity: it opened an encrypted tunnel between your machines, negotiating its way through home routers automatically rather than asking you to forward ports or hold a static IP. The third was that it carried both Screen Sharing and File Sharing over that tunnel, so a Mac hundreds of miles away behaved almost exactly like a Mac in the next room.

The part people remember most fondly is what it did not ask of you. There was no router configuration, no dynamic DNS account, no VPN to maintain, no address to memorise. You signed in to the same iCloud account on both machines and the rest was handled. That expectation is the real thing Apple removed, and it is why every replacement feels like more work than it should.

Why did Apple remove it?

Apple never published a detailed reason. The deprecation notice in Mojave simply recommended alternatives for each of the three jobs: iCloud Drive for reaching files, Screen Sharing for reaching a screen, and Apple Remote Desktop for managing machines. That advice was widely criticised at the time, because two of those three only work on your local network and the third is a paid administration tool, so none of them actually does the thing Back to My Mac was valued for.

The reasonable guess is maintenance cost against usage. The feature relied on a fairly involved combination of wide-area Bonjour, IPv6 and IPsec tunnelling, plus router negotiation that had to keep working against a moving target of consumer hardware. It was almost certainly used by a small, technical minority of Mac owners. Apple's own dead documentation is the clearest evidence of how completely it was retired: the support page that announced the shutdown now returns a 404.

What covers each part of the job now

Is Screen Sharing a replacement?

Only on your own Wi-Fi. macOS Screen Sharing is genuinely good software and it is free on every Mac, but it depends on Bonjour to find your Mac and Bonjour announcements do not cross a router. From a cafe or a mobile connection there is nothing for it to discover, and even if you knew the address, your Mac sits behind your router's NAT with no reachable public address of its own. If you are on mobile data you are usually behind carrier-grade NAT as well, so neither end can be reached directly. This is a networking limitation rather than an Apple one, and it is exactly the limitation Back to My Mac used to paper over.

Screen sharing through Messages does work over the internet, but it is built for helping another person with their Mac and needs someone at the other end to accept the request. That makes it useless for reaching your own machine while you are out, which is the case that matters here.

Does Apple Remote Desktop replace it?

No, and the name is genuinely misleading. Apple Remote Desktop is a paid administration tool on the Mac App Store, designed for managing a room full of Macs: software distribution, reporting, running commands across many machines at once. It speaks the same underlying protocol as Screen Sharing and runs into the same NAT wall. Buying it does not give you access to your Mac from outside your network; it gives you fleet management on a network you can already reach. It was listed in Apple's own deprecation advice, which is part of why that advice landed so badly.

The four realistic replacements

• A VPN back to your home network. Runs on many routers or on a spare machine, and once connected everything behaves as though you were at home, Screen Sharing included. It is the closest thing to a true replacement and the most work to set up and keep running.
• A mesh VPN such as Tailscale. Far easier than a traditional VPN, handles NAT traversal for you, and puts your devices on a private network wherever they are. This is what most technical Mac owners moved to, and it pairs well with Screen Sharing.
• Port forwarding on your router. Technically works, and worth ruling out. It exposes port 5900 to the open internet, where it is scanned constantly, and it fails entirely behind carrier-grade NAT.
• A remote access app that handles the network itself. Screens, Jump Desktop, RustDesk, AnyDesk and Servey all bring their own relay or peer-to-peer layer, so there is nothing to configure. This is the option that most resembles the old experience of it simply working, and if you want it working today rather than soon, buy one of the established ones.

Where Servey fits

Servey was built for exactly the gap Back to My Mac left. There is no router configuration at any point: no port forwarding, no VPN to maintain, no dynamic DNS, no static IP. You sign in with Google on your Mac and on your iPhone or iPad, and your Mac is simply there - which is the same bargain iCloud used to offer. It chooses its own path: on your own Wi-Fi it streams a direct hardware-encoded HEVC feed, sharper than the VNC picture Screen Sharing gives you and still legible when you pinch to zoom into small text. Away from home it switches by itself to a private peer-to-peer connection, end-to-end encrypted between your own two devices, with NAT traversal built to survive strict carrier networks and CGNAT.

It also adds the thing Back to My Mac never had: a genuine terminal on your Mac, one tap from the mirrored screen, so when the answer is a command you type it rather than driving a keyboard through a video feed. The honest limits are worth stating. Servey is Apple-only, it reaches your own Mac rather than any machine anywhere, and it does not mount your Mac's disk in the Finder the way Back to My Mac's File Sharing did. If whole-disk file access from afar is the part you miss most, a mesh VPN with File Sharing is the closer match.

Bottom line

Back to My Mac was quietly one of the best things about owning two Macs, and Apple has not replaced it in the seven years since it was switched off. The advice Apple gave on the way out does not survive contact with the actual problem, because Screen Sharing and File Sharing both stop at your router. The two honest answers today are a mesh VPN if you enjoy running your own infrastructure, or an app that handles the network for you if you do not. If what you want back is the specific feeling of your Mac just being there on the device in your hand, with a real shell alongside it, that is what Servey is for. It launches soon from $1.99 a month, or ₹99 in India.