And, of course, if you ever get a screen sharing request from someone you don’t know, you can always click Block This User to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

They can once again choose to Accept or Decline, and choose between allowing you to control the screen or just observe them using it. Obviously, clicking Decline immediately terminates the connection.Īfter clicking Accept, the other person gets yet another permission request, this time with additional options. The other person needs to accept the connection request, which they do by clicking Accept in the notification that appears, likely in the upper-right corner of the screen. Needless to say, macOS doesn’t allow anyone to connect to a Mac like this without permission. Then, in the dialog that appears, enter the person’s Apple ID, which is likely their email address, and click Connect. (For future reference, it’s stored in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Screen Sharing.) The Screen Sharing app should be the top hit-press Return to launch it. Press Command-Space to open Spotlight and type “Screen Sharing”. Second, if Messages doesn’t work for you (those commands are often dimmed), or the other person doesn’t use Messages, there’s another option. The other person can also initiate the connection with you by choosing Buddies > Invite to Share My Screen. There are multiple ways to connect to a remote Mac for screen sharing, but two stand out as being particularly easy.įirst, if you communicate in Messages with the person whose Mac you’re trying to control, make sure your conversation with them is selected, and then choose Buddies > Ask to Share Screen.

(Don’t worry-there are multiple ways that Apple ensures that this feature can’t be used surreptitiously.) Initiate the Connection They don’t even need to enable Screen Sharing in System Preferences > Sharing. With the Mac’s built-in Screen Sharing app, you can either observe or control another person’s Mac, anywhere on the Internet. But it doesn’t have to be that way, thanks to a built-in feature of macOS that you may not have known about: screen sharing. Now, however, with everyone staying at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, answering those questions has seemingly gotten harder. Are you the person your friends and family members turn to for questions about the Mac? In normal times, those questions might come over dinner or at another in-person gathering, such that you could look directly at their Mac to see what was going on.

Screen sharing for mac over internet