That’s the bane of a tech’s existence: providing tech support to family and friends, especially during vacations. But the winners of Microsoft’s Hackathon app think they have a new twist: a remote access app for smartphones to help family members.
Family Tech Support is a proposed app that will be subject to broader review at Microsoft and possibly General Manager Satya Nadella for approval. (The link takes you to the team’s page, where you can sign up for more information.) Nicole Berdy and her team beat over 10,000 other apps in Microsoft’s recent Hackathon, which included over 68,000 employees, Microsoft said.
Microsoft already gives family members options to help friends and family through solutions like Remote Desktop, a fantastic PC-specific solution that allows a trusted computer to remotely access a remote PC, control and solve all problems. (Remote Desktop does require the affected PC to be running Windows 10/11 Pro, however, which is why there are sometimes better third-party solutions.) But what Berdy and his team are offering is a solution for a smartphone, which is another avenue for Microsoft absolutely.
Although Microsoft killed off its mobile phone platform, Windows 10 Mobile, at the end of 2019, Microsoft continued to maintain a strong presence on Android, with numerous releases of its Office apps, Outlook, Bing, and more. The Windows “Your Phone” app basically allows a PC to remotely control an Android smartphone, run apps remotely and interact with the screen, as well as make phone calls and send text messages. . It’s likely that the same principles underpin a Family Tech Support app, either via PC-to-mobile or a direct mobile-to-mobile experience.
The latter is certainly a direction Microsoft is talking about, based on a quote from Rajeshwari Godbole, developer of Microsoft’s Nuance Dragon Anywhere app. “Every time I visited them, I would set them the home screen with their favorite apps, but they accidentally deleted the shortcut and called me thinking the app was gone and they broke it , or they hold the phone down with a finger on the volume button and end up muting it and couldn’t hear it ringing, and I just wish I could see the screen to know what was wrong” , Godbole said, referring to interactions with parents and in-laws.
There are already many remote access apps for Android, including TeamViewer and Android-VNC-Viewer. But Microsoft apparently thinks there could also be room to bring its brand and ecosystem to the space — assuming Nadella approves.