2021-10-25 Update: Screens Connect 4.11 is now available. More details in this blog post.
For over 10 years, Screens Connect has been relying on an API provided by Apple to create a port mapping on a router, which makes it possible to connect to your Mac remotely via Screens.
That API proved to be quite reliable until Apple released macOS 12 Monterey beta in June 2021. Suddenly, the API no longer worked and just failed. We contacted Apple and after talking to one of their engineers, it was mentioned to us that this regression was a most likely a bug and would eventually be fixed.
However, Apple has just released macOS 12 Beta 9 and 4 months later, the regression is still present. Moreover, it seems like there may be some restrictions to use that API with macOS 12 as we’ve seen some weird new errors while trying the API in the past few betas. We haven’t heard back from Apple since June.
So a few weeks ago we came to the conclusion that we could no longer rely on that API as it looks like a) it doesn’t seem to be a priority for Apple and b) Apple may plan to restrict access to that API, which wouldn’t work for Screens Connect.
Luckily, we’ve been working on a solution and we’re happy to announce that Screens Connect 4.11 now solves the issues introduced in macOS 12. And according to our tests, it works as well or even better than we were using previously!
Since we’re soft launching Screens Connect 4.11, we only made it available as an update for users running macOS 12 to restore connectivity. However, the new version works as well on macOS 10.11 or later and we plan to make it widely available in a few weeks.
