After 6 years, Remotely is now available
Today Adam, Zack and myself are pleased as punch to announce Remotely is finally available to download on the App Store. Remotely connects to your home Mac securely, allowing you to browse, view, search, download & share all of your files.
Our vision has always been to enable people to be able to access their files on their own terms, without having to push their private content to 3rd party servers. Doing so has to be simple and secure.
Historically, this typically means going down the realm of the tech-savvy: setting up an sftp, ssh, forwarding ports, using a vnc client or other such time-consuming endeavors for folks who aren’t IT-savvy. Not so simple.
Remotely is a simple, zero-configuration, point to point, completely secure alternative. We hope you like it.
Our first attempt: Here, File File
We started this journey in 2010, when we announced Here, File File. Our humble little pitch video, based on a working prototype, got quite a bit of attention (to us, anyway) and even won us an award that helped fund the project.
We released Here, File File to surprising (again, to us anyway) success. HFF had many practical uses we hadn’t even considered, and our novel “desk” UI made for an engaging little experience. Shortly after launch, Apple even showcased our app in a commercial. We were on cloud (hurr hurr) 9.
Here, File File was based on NAT traversal which required either rock-solid UPnP or an understanding of port forwarding. We thought this was simple enough, but it turns out there are too many cases where this breaks down pretty badly. Plus, unless the customer had set up Dynamic DNS or had a reliably static IP, the whole house of cards could come tumbling down at any moment.
Roughly one in every two purchases resulted in a complicated support request and we spent more time walking people through network issues than improving the product. It was really disheartening to see that we had failed at one of key goals: for a large amount of our customers, HFF wasn’t simple at all. We made the tough decision to pull it from the app store, and went back to the drawing board.
Eureka, simplicity achieved!
Over the past six years, it seems like we tried everything. We will detail our trials in a future post, but we were pretty bummed out by the whole thing to be honest. Finally, around 2014, we discovered a method that could create a completely secure point-to-point connection.
The only issue with this solution was its reliance on a secure auth mechanism. We were afraid it would be confusing to require you to set up an account with us to create a point to point connection. Someone could easily see such a step as allowing 3rd party access to their files.
Thankfully that very year Apple announced developer access to CloudKit auth. The latest numbers on iCloud saturation is one billion active devices. That’s good enough to rely on for us, though time will tell if an iCloud requirement becomes a stumbling block.
The result is a setup process that feels a whole lot like magic. You install the Helper on your Mac, then open Remotely on your iOS device, and there’s your files. No configuration required. Move the computer to another network, put it behind your corporate firewall, it doesn’t matter; you will be able to connect to it with your iOS device from anywhere.
We’re just getting warmed up
I want to take a moment to thank all of our beta testers for sticking with us through these years. It was an exciting moment when 100% of our beta test community connected successfully. We literally could not have done it without you.
We have lots of features planned, and we are excited to hear from you what features you’d like to see. Remotely is a free download (access to your Documents folder, $2.99 a month to access everything), so please give it a try and send us your feedback.
