It’s the bane of a techie’s existence: offering tech assist to household and buddies, particularly on the holidays. But the winners of Microsoft’s Hackathon app assume they’ve a brand new twist: a remote-access app for smartphones to assist out relations.

Family Tech Support is a proposed app that can be submitted to broader overview at Microsoft and finally chief government Satya Nadella for approval. (The hyperlink goes to the staff’s web page, the place you possibly can join additional data.) Nicole Berdy and her staff beat greater than 10,000 different purposes at Microsoft’s current Hackathon, which included greater than 68,000 staff, Microsoft said.

Microsoft already gives choices for relations to assist family and friends by way of options like Remote Desktop, a fantastic PC-specific solution that enables a trusted laptop to remotely entry a far-away PC, management it, and remedy any issues. (Remote Desktop requires the affected PC to be operating Windows 10/11 Pro, nonetheless, which is why there are generally better third-party solutions.) But what Berdy and her staff are proposing is an answer for a smartphone, which is a unique observe for Microsoft altogether.

Though Microsoft killed off its mobile phone platform, Windows 10 Mobile, on the finish of 2019, Microsoft has continued to take care of a robust presence in Android, with quite a few variations of its Office apps, Outlook, Bing, and so forth. The Windows “Your Phone” app primarily permits a PC to remotely control an Android smartphone, operating distant apps and interacting with the display screen, in addition to inserting telephone calls and sending texts. It’s seemingly that the identical rules would underlie a Family Tech Support app, both by way of PC-to-mobile or a straight mobile-to-mobile expertise.

The latter is definitely a route Microsoft is speaking about, based mostly on a quote from Rajeshwari Godbole, a developer for Microsoft’s Nuance Dragon Anywhere app. “Whenever I would visit, I would set up the home screen for them with their favorite apps, but then they’d accidentally delete the shortcut, and they’d call me thinking the app was gone and they broke it, or they’d hold the phone with a finger on the volume button and end up putting it on mute and couldn’t hear it ringing anymore, and I just wished I could see the screen to know what was wrong,” Godbole mentioned, referring to interactions with dad and mom and in-laws.

There are already quite a few remote-access apps for Android, together with CrewViewer and Android-VNC-Viewer. But Microsoft apparently thinks that there may be room to convey its model and its ecosystem into the house, too — assuming Nadella indicators off on it.