FireTop Privacy

Alpha · version 0.0.51

Reach your desktop from anywhere. Without handing it to anyone.

FireTop is a remote desktop app for Windows and Mac. There's no account and no sign-up — you pair two machines by hand, and screen, audio and input are protected end to end. When a session travels through FireTop's relay, the relay forwards sealed content it cannot read.

Download for Windows Windows 64-bit · .exe · 7.1 MB Download for Mac Apple Silicon · .dmg · 9.3 MB

Released 1 September 2026 · Installs updates on its own from then on

What it does

Built so that reaching your machine doesn't mean sharing it.

No account to create

There's nothing to sign up for and nothing to log into. You pair two machines by showing a QR code or pairing code on the computer you want to reach, and entering it on the computer you're reaching from. Pairing is something you do once, by hand, on both ends.

Sealed end to end

Screen, audio and input are protected with the Noise protocol. A session that travels through FireTop's relay stays opaque to it — the relay forwards sealed content and cannot decrypt it. Routing and session metadata do remain visible to the relay.

Your own network first

FireTop tries a direct connection on your local network before anything else, and falls back to the relay only when it can't get through. On a network Windows has categorised as public it won't open an inbound port at all — it uses the relay instead, and tells you so.

Windows and Mac, both directions

Every install does both jobs: host this machine so you can reach it later, or connect out to one you've already paired. Windows to Mac, Mac to Windows, or either to its own kind.

Before you install

Things we'd rather tell you now than let you discover.

  • This is alpha software

    FireTop is in active development and it does break. Put it on a machine where a misbehaving remote desktop app is an inconvenience rather than a problem.

  • Windows will warn you about the installer

    The installer isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC". Choose More info, then Run anyway. Signing it properly is on the list.

  • Apple Silicon Macs only

    The Mac build runs on Apple Silicon — M1 and later. There's no Intel build. The disk image is signed and notarised by Apple, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning.

  • Some hosting situations don't work yet

    Hosting a Windows machine at its sign-in screen works on desktops with a single graphics chip, but not on laptops with two. With remote login turned off, locking a Windows machine stops the picture until someone signs back in — the session stays up, but the screen stops updating.