How to Enable Teamviewer’ Screen Sharing Permissions on a Mac

How to grant access to TeamViewer on your Mac

If you’re starting TeamViewer 14 or higher on your Mac running macOS 10.14 (Mojave) or higher for the first time, you will be prompted with the following dialog:

You can also open this dialog by clicking on Help –> Check system access.

By default, all permissions are set to Denied. Please give permission to the system capabilities manually to use TeamViewer as desired. If you or others need to access the Mac remotely, Screen Recording and Accessibility are required at a minimum.

📌Note: If you are managing Macs in your organizations through an MDM system, you can use Privacy Preferences Policy Control (PPPC) payloads to configure Accessibility and Full Disk Access permissions. Your users will still need to grant Screen Recording access themselves, this permission does not require admin credentials.

To allow access, click the buttons shown in the dialog. Eg. click to allow Accessibility, click on Request Access… –  then confirm by clicking on Open System Preferences

which will bring you to the Accessibility section of the Privacy panel, inside the Security & Privacy preferences:

For Accessibility access, you will need to click the padlock icon in the lower-left corner to make changes. You might be prompted to enter the credentials of an administrator account to continue.

Put a check next to TeamViewer to grant it access:

📌Note: If you are seeing the entry TeamViewer_Desktop in your list, make sure to check this box as well.

Repeat the same for Full Disk Access and Screen Recording. Those are required to control your Mac.

Click again on the padlock in the lower-left corner to prevent further changes.

Once you have done it for every category, you can close the Security & Privacy window. The next time you want to receive an incoming connection with TeamViewer, the person connecting to your Mac will be able to see and control your device.

The permission status can be reviewed under Help -> Check system access at any time.

The yellow triangle icon in the upper-left area of the TeamViewer window is shown until you have allowed the system access for TeamViewer:

📌Note: if you’re using an older version of TeamViewer, you won’t see the triangle icon above. Instead, the Mac will display a system dialog informing you that TeamViewer wants to access additional resources. The settings must be changed on the remote side.

 

How to grant access when you aren’t presented with the dialog

If you’re using an older version of TeamViewer, and you’re not presented with the Review System Access dialog asking you to grant access to TeamViewer – or if you had previously clicked the Deny button on that dialog – it’s still possible to grant access to TeamViewer.

Additionally, in some cases, you can grant access to TeamViewer immediately after installing TeamViewer onto your Mac, before the first TeamViewer connection is made to your computer. Note that this is not possible with TeamViewer Host.

Here’s how:

1) Go to System Preferences, then Security & Privacy, then Privacy, then Screen Recording, Full Disk Access, and Accessibility.

2) Only for Accessibility: Click the lock icon to make changes.

3) If TeamViewer is already shown in the panel, then put a check next to it to enable it.

4) If not, click the small button with the plus symbol underneath the panel. This opens a Finder window:

5) Navigate to your Applications folder, select TeamViewer, and click Open.

6) Now you should have TeamViewer listed in the panel and enabled.