Minneapolis Q4 2025, launched April 2026

Mac, iPad and iPhone from one design, and a 4.8-star launch

Remote desktop for the AI era. Monitor and control agents running on a headless Mac from anywhere.

ux/ui design
ios app design
macos app design
design system

The Astropad Workbench iPhone app held in one hand, showing a Mac desktop and its mini map

3 platforms: Mac, iPad and iPhone, 15 screens designed as one product
4.8 stars: from 148 App Store ratings for the app we designed
TechCrunch: covered the launch, with MacRumors, 9to5Mac and AppleInsider the same day

The challenge

Remote desktop is a solved category, and that was the problem. The products that exist were built for IT support: someone fixing a machine that belongs to somebody else, at a desk, through a keyboard and a mouse. Workbench is for a different situation. An AI agent is running on a headless Mac mini somewhere, and the person responsible for it wants to see what it is doing from wherever they are. They are reading a log, approving something, or restarting a job that stalled. Often from a phone, in a queue. That put the design on three screens at once, and the three do not agree with each other. What sits in a window on a Mac is the whole canvas on an iPad and a 27-inch desktop squeezed into one hand on an iPhone. One product had to stay legible on all of them without turning into three products. Astropad has shipped Apple-native software since 2013 and owns the streaming codec underneath this one, so whatever we handed over had to be usable by a team with a decade of platform opinions.

A person in silhouette at a MacBook in Astropad's orange studio light, working on an illustration

The Astropad Workbench iPhone app held in one hand, listing two connected MacBooks

What we did

1Design one product for three screens
The three apps had to read as one product without pretending the devices are the same. On the Mac, the remote machine sits in a window beside everything else a person is doing. On the iPad, it takes the full canvas and the Apple Pencil becomes a precision cursor. On the iPhone, a 27-inch desktop has to survive being held in one hand, which is the point where panning around stops working and navigation has to become something closer to a map. We designed each surface to its own platform conventions and held the model underneath identical, so moving between them is a change of device rather than a change of product.
2Hand a system to an in-house team
Astropad builds its own software and its own streaming codec, so our work ended where their engineering began. What went over was a system rather than a folder of screens: 15 screens across the three platforms, plus the components, states and rules their team needed to build the apps and keep building them once we stepped away. That mattered more than usual here because the product moves quickly. We finished in Q4 2025, Workbench launched in April 2026, and it had reached version 1.2.6 by the end of July. A system keeps up with that. Fixed screens would have been stale by the second release.