Survey reveals you’d rather go hands-on than try to troubleshoot with a remote app

We’re just two weeks away from Thanksgiving, when Americans across the country will be traveling to spend time with family. And if you’re the technically minded one of your family (you are reading a smartphone blog, to be fair), there’s a fair chance that at some point you’re going to be pulled aside and asked to help troubleshoot something or other. While you hopefully manage to sort the problem out quickly, what do you do after the holidays are over, everyone’s returned home, and grandpa is still having problems with his phone?

Last weekend, we took a look at some of our favorite apps for non-techies, and one of the first categories that came to mind was remote support apps. Trying to diagnose someone’s phone problems when you’ve got the device right in your hands is one thing, but if you’re trying to give support remotely, operating blind can be a recipe for frustration. Even if the user you’re trying to help can accurately describe what they’re seeing, getting them to follow you instructions to the letter can be more trouble that it’s worth.

Remote support apps address exactly that issue by giving you direct access to the problem device. Once they’re set up, we can remotely connect to a relative’s phone from thousands of miles away and see just what they’re seeing, enabling us to much more easily identify what’s going wrong. And then being able to control the phone at the same time empowers us to actually solve the problem.

In theory, it’s a great solution, but one that does require a bit of forethought: You’re in bad shape if you’re trying to talk someone though installing a remote support app after they’re already having phone problems.

That feels like the sort of speedbump that might limit the appeal a bit — are people really thinking this far ahead? Do they actually bother with apps like these, or do they prefer other approaches to remote troubleshooting? Well, we could speculate all day, but this time we put the question directly to you — and now we have some results:

Do you use remote support apps to troubleshoot friends’ and family members’ phones?

As it turns out, not a ton of you are taking advantage of remote support apps at all — and fewer still, pursuing it as a first option. While a good two-thirds of you end up playing the troubleshooter role at some point or another, the vast majority there prefer to do so without the help of an app like TeamViewer.

Although 12% of respondents are open to the idea of remote support apps as a last-ditch option, only 10% of you are reaching for them right out of the gate. And somehow, 36% of you have managed to convince your friends and family that you don’t know how to fix their phones at all — not the worst strategy, we’ll concede.

Looking into the comments, reader grokker recommends RustDesk for your remote support needs: “much better than TeamViewer and open source.”

By and large, though, you didn’t have much to add to your votes, letting the numbers speak for themselves. Like we mentioned before, part of the reason this kind of solution may not be more popular is that it requires some level of initial setup, and that’s not always easy to do remotely.

We also suppose it’s possible that the stigma around remote support apps being co-opted by scammers for nefarious purposes may have some of you thinking twice about them. If you get grandpa comfortable letting you troubleshoot his phone remotely, is it more likely that he might one day give a scammer remote access to his phone?

But if you’ve just never even tried this kind of solution: Give it a chance! You might find it dramatically improves your life as the family’s designated smartphone expert.