The Best Free VNC App For The IPhone And IPad for Windows and Mac PC’s

I spent a lot of time looking at VNC apps for the iPhone for a few reasons:

1. I cannot tell you the number of times I have got to work and realised I have left behind an important document or file that I was working on.
2. My phone doesn’t support flash but my computer does and there are a few sites that I really like
3. There are times that I want to access a forum or site for information at work but can’t because of the web security software.
4. Last but not least, it’s pretty cool and I'm a sucker for a simple and efficient piece of technology that makes my wife shake her head and sigh as I tell her about it

Okay so all of these reasons made a strong case for getting a good app so that I could remote desktop from phone. The only problem was that when I first searched for one in the app store I found a whole host of applications that in many cases were pretty costly.

I absolutely hate finding apps that cost more than £2 because I always get the feeling those developers would be making a lot more money by selling more units at a lower cost. Angry Birds is one of the highest grossing apps in the app store and the reason for that is because they had a great addictive product and they sold it for £0.59p. The difference was they sold several million copies.

The prices for the top 8 are as follows:

iTeleport: Jaadu (£14.99) ($22.00)
Mocha (£3.49) ($5.20)
Wyse Pocket Cloud (£8.99) (£13.45)
VNC Viewer (£5.99) ($8.98)
iTap (£6.99) ($10.48)
LogMeIn Ignition (£17.99) ($26.98)
VNC Pocket Office (£2.99) ($4.48)
Remote Desktop – RDP (£3.99) ($5.98)

So personal feelings aside I did force myself to consider that a VNC app could be fairly complicated and maybe that justified the higher price.  That said I really wanted a free VNC app.

From the list of VNC apps above I tried a number of the free “lite” versions.  In many cases the lite versions were fine; they just removed some key functionality like no keyboard or right-click functionality.  Some of the apps though would not work with the home edition of Windows 7 or Vista.  This was a problem for me as well as I have the home edition of Windows 7.

It wasn’t until I searched for “remote desktop” and scrolled quite far down the list before I came across TeamViewer.  It seemed to be the ultimate VNC app.  It was:

1. Free (As long as you are going to use it for personal use)
2. Gave full access and functionality to my home PC
3. Not a lite version

The process for installing it was pretty standard and simple. 

1. You download the app
2. Download some software from the TeamViewer website onto your PC
3. Take the connection details from your PC and punch them into the app on your phone and that was it

I could have ended up paying £14.99/$22.00 but I now have a fully functioning VNC app for free.  It works perfectly, I have tried it on a 3G connection from work and at home on my WiFi.  There wasn’t really any point to trying it at home other than the fun of watching the mouse move around as I moved my finger over my iPhone screen!