Epic TeamViewer Reliability Rant
Pour yourself a cup and read my long list of TeamViewer gripes...
Background: I’m I.T. guy, a paid TV premium subscriber for 12 years, and *very heavy* user of TV. My internet connection is rock-solid symmetrical gigabit fiber to my local ISP and my very-capable workstation is hard-wired to my router.
1 - TV Service Unavailable
With increasing frequency over the years, TV is simply unavailable. I cannot connect to many of my endpoints. Just today, 05-Aug-2022, I have a ton of endpoints that I cannot connect to. Some I can, some I cannot.
TV’s status page, status.teamviewer.com, is worthless. I checked today, it’s green across the board. Past outages, same thing. Yet when I check using Down Detector, there’s hundreds of reports of TV outages. Curious that TV’s own status detector that presumably should have the best data be the least indicative???
This has happened many times, not just today. TV outages that prevent me from connecting to any number of my endpoints, costing me time, money, and credibility with my clients. This is the single most aggravating complaint, of the many that I have.
2 - ID numbers randomly changing
I have hundreds of endpoints. Of those, a dozen or so are headless servers running TeamViewer Host (TVH). Several times now over the last 2-3 years, TVH will randomly assign a new Connection ID. These are endpoints that I routinely connect to. From what I read, others are experiencing this, too.
Imagine how big of a pain it is to have to make a special trip (driving) to the server, dragging a monitor along, just to get the new CID? I have clients all over the US. Driving to the client to obtain a randomly changed CID isn’t even possible many times due to distance so I get to embarrass myself by asking the client to scrounge up a monitor, plug it in, to look for me.
I’ve turned in two tickets about this, provided logs, and no resolution.
Since TV tech/engineering is apparently incapable of fixing this, I’ve since developed a scheduled task that runs at endpoint restart that captures the CID and, if it’s changed, sends me an email with the new CID. Pretty pathetic that I had to write custom code to fix a fundamental TV flaw.
3. Echoed mouse pointer moves, but no screen updates.
I have remote mouse echo turned on so I can readily see if my input is working. Quite frequently, I’ll find that I can move the mouse but the screen is not updating. e.g. I cannot drag a window, click a link, or see text when typing into a text field, when I could just seconds before. The only fix is to drop the connection and reconnect. It might happen again a minute later, 10 minutes later, or it might not.
This happens *a lot*. Easily several times per day when connecting to any number of my endpoints.
4. Endpoint appears online (blue icon on C&C console) but cannot connect.
Sometimes the endpoint is actually powered-off, as confirmed by the client. Other times, who knows? And I’ve had the exact opposite happen. An endpoint in the C&C will appear offline but I can still connect.
So, what used to be a pretty reliable indicator of an endpoint being online or not is no longer so reliable.
5. Slow file transfer
TV file transfer has gotten better recently, but it’s still slower that many other methods – sometimes much slower. I’ve resorted to using sites like WeTransfer or JustBeamIt when I need to move more than a few hundred KB between me and the endpoint.
6. Opening more than 6-8 endpoints slows everything down
The premium edition of TV allows me to open, I believe, as many as 15 (not sure) simultaneous sessions. I’ve never opened that many, but I routinely open 6 to 8 sessions. I have found that the more sessions I have open, the slower and less reliable each session becomes. Sometimes it gets so groggy I have to terminate them all and reconnect.
7. Tech support pretty useless.
OK, I’m a tech guy. I know that tech supp depts may need input from me. But in all the times I’ve sent logs to TV tech supp, I have nothing resolved as a result. And each email volley takes 2-3 days before I hear back. I’ve gotten to where I don’t even want to contact support any longer, that’s how bad it is.
CLOSING
When TV works, it’s great and I love it. The C&C does what I want, the connections usually work fine. But in my 12 years of using TV (since v5), my experience has gotten worse – and the last 3-4 years those bad experiences are increasing even faster.
I would rate the "older" TV 4.5 stars. I would rate today’s TV 3 stars.
If I was starting fresh today looking for a remote control solution to use the way I use TV and knowing what I know now, I would not choose TV! But I am too invested in TV now. I simply have too many endpoints scattered all over the place. Dumping TV would be more work than it’s worth -- right now.
But I tell ya, if this trend continues, then I will bite the bullet and begin vetting replacement services.
So if you are reading my rant and even think you might use TV as heavily as I do (hours a day, every day) then I advise you to carefully reconsider that.
