Shadow PC Reviews

When I first got ShadowPC, I loaded up GTAV and played with my MFi compatible controller for about an hour solid, while at my desk, on my iPad. I didn’t even feel latency or notice a difference from my desktop experience. However, when I tried to play a game that required cursor input, things got a little hard. When trying to play WoW, mouse moving the camera is not an option. Also the keyboard controls don’t work unless you have the show keyboard option selected with the Smart Keyboard. Next, I tried PoE. I found that I could move around but I wasn’t able to press any key bound attacks (QWERT) to actually attack. If this could work, I would def play sitting on my couch with my iPad. The inputs to move didn’t seem to have very much latency at all, definitely playable. Lastly, I did load up Cities Skylines and played that for a little bit. It works, albeit very awkwardly. To move you have to push your finger to the edge of the screen and drag back and forth. Also to do any other camera controls, you need click every thing, the Smart KB didn’t seem to have any response when trying to use the buttons.

If the kinks with the Smart Keyboard were worked out, this would be a viable experience for mouse and KB input games on iPad. Currently, the only experience you can really have is one with a controller, which sadly is not a lot of the games I play.

ShadowPC needs USB device support. Mice, keyboards, controllers, etc. all do not work with the iOS app which makes it absolutely useless until support for these devices are added. I am wasting money every month waiting for these features because I don’t want to have to wait another two months for my subscription to be activated again sometime in the future.

Update: I have switched to the “TestFlight” version of the Shadow app, and, as stated in the developer response, peripherals work as expected (there are issues with scrolling when using the Apple Magic Mouse 2, but that may be a Windows thing, not a Shadow thing). Updating my review to 4 stars, since this extra step of downloading a beta version of ShadowPC to get this basic functionality should not be necessary.

Before I got my Shadow, I tried the following services:

Google Cloud gaming VM.
Microsoft Azure cloud gaming VM.
Nvidia Geforce Now
Google Stadia

With the Google VM, I had latency issues I couldn’t solve, with both Google and Microsoft, using a microphone was a terrible experience (I was using Parsec btw). The mic never worked properly and the fees were too expensive. And of course, these services are complex and modular so it would be very difficult for most people to get setup and running.

With Nvidia and Google Stadia, the performance and sound were good but you can only play games. I’d say those services are fine if you literally just want to play and have no interest in using any apps, mods, live streaming, or anything like that.

Now on to Shadow. On the first day my service was activated, all my issues were solved. All my games run lag-free and the sound is perfect. I’m even using a complex setup with discord, Teamspeak, in-game chat, and sometimes live streaming via OBS, all running at the same time and everything is top-notch. Not only that, but as a web developer, I now have a wonderfully smooth and fast PC to test my work on. In addition, I’m now running Adobe Premier and getting fast rendering done whenever I need to.

Conclusion: This is the future of gaming and computing. You can choose to believe it or not, but it’s here to stay and Shadow is the first company doing it right.

Thank you for all your hard work. It shows!

ShadowPC is amazing!! Thank you so much Shadow Tech for making such an amazing app for us!! Your technology is amazing and is so much better than competitors like GeForce Now. Granted, GeForce Now is free, but the mobile versions specifically are nowhere near as good as shadow! ShadowPC is really great and allows keyboard usage along with integrated virtual controller setups!! No need for an extra keyboard and mouse! There is no wait time or limit to time, unlike GeForce! ShadowPC and company over all is completely amazing!!! Revolutionary!!!!!!!

Word of advice to developers... ShadowPC would look more appealing to the viewer if ShadowPC page shows more informative and exciting images of gameplay and usage. I looked over this before but the images seemed as though it was just for settings or something. Other than that, ShadowPC is simply AMAZING!!

Thank you Shadow Tech Developers!! This is awesome!!!!

It does what it says at a cost less than provisioning your own machine on AWS, although latency is a tad higher than on a very local AWS data center.

1. The shadow service recognizes Virtual Desktop for Oculus Quest (1&2) and will keep a session alive so gameplay isn’t disrupted. Please do the same for moonlight (nvidia game stream). It’s simply a better streamer. Your app is great, but for the lowest latency and best responsiveness, moonlight wins. Just give me a way to keep the service alive without having to have a machine logged in and a desktop streamed.

2. Give me pixel doubled “native” resolution on iOS devices. The true NATIVE resolution makes everything so insanely small. Yes, I can scale it to 200%, but this is immediately reset when I connect with a different device. Just give one more native mode but pixel doubled and life would be lovely (or set a scaling factor automatically for me.)

3. Give me a multiuser option. I’d like to share this with a child in my household and I don’t want to manage two machines. Yes, I know I can make additional logins on a machine, but I can’t set the login user in ShadowPC , so it means I have to select a user and type a password every time I login. Not that big of a deal, but not a slick as starting ShadowPC and being at the desktop almost instantly.

Take care of a few of these and it would definitely be worth keeping this over maintaining my own PC.

Shadow team, phenomenal job on this initial release!

Seeing as how shadow is a front-end for a desktop-centric experience (and gaming) it’s important to have the right ‘mechanics’ for movement within the desktop and games. Please take a look at Remotix or Jump desktop (also found within ShadowPC Store) and the cursor mechanics along with keyboard mechanics these apps utilize as they have a Remote Desktop and gaming experience that caters toward smartphone and tablet power users. They also have support for an amazing Bluetooth mouse (yes indeed!!) called the swiftpoint GT which is just phenomenal. You can literally use those apps + swiftpoint to have a complete mobile desktop in your pocket. We want the same for Shadow please because Shadow is so much more than just another Remote Desktop client. It’s a triple-A game streamer that NEEDS proper cursor and keyboard mechanics.

My friend got his shadow activated early and i am waiting on mine around march. We tested and played on his shadow and there are a fee things that no one has talked about.

1 dual monitors IS supported and works
2 if dual monitors doesnt work for you you can also use it like a dual pc setup with your pc on the second monitor and shadow on the first
And you can also the latency is almost nonexistent. You just have to have good internet. The majority of complaints are just people with the bare minimum allowed connection. Its better to have atleast a 50mbps connection. My friend and i both have 300mbps and it works so good. Not only that but the ability to download games like gta 4x faster than our already fast speeds. Good work and dont let another company take the idea and do better you guys are awesome

it’s a awesome app because you get a full windows 10 gaming pc go $16 a month and you can cancel anytime or if you want to sign up for a year it’s $12-13 a month the only thing i found to be a downside is the setup waiting period at the moment it takes some time because the fine people at shadow have to set up your account on one of their high end gaming pcs and if you are thinking of getting shadow you will need to go to their website to buy a pre order and set up an account i’m so glad i found out about ShadowPC and this company’s awesome idea to try to break apples walled garden in a way by bring windows onto apple devices and i would say $16 a month is a good price to pay to have the freedom to do what you want on your iphone through having a pc that you don’t have to update with constant graphics card or cpu changes or more ram and fried components because shadow takes care of all the heavy lifting you just pay a monthly fee and you have a top of the line pc you can take anywhere as long as you have wifi

It’s really unreliable. Shadow locks me out often. It’s data hungry like nothing ever before it. It could be the way of the future but, we really need to figure a way to make it easier on my data plan. Updated; The more I figure out how to set shadow up for my current bandwidth, the more I’m able to set it to my needs. This is gonna revolutionize gaming. Nothing could possibly compare to this on mobile. In fact I believe it could be developed as the new standard. My gaming experience is no longer ShadowPC Store for mobile-ITS THE STEAM STORE!! I’m playing Red Dead 2 on my phone!! I see the future being this platform-with an interface specifically made for mobile. What’s really interesting is the combined DNA... the power of a pc with the functionality of your touchscreen to interact with the game-really handy with games that use a lot of MFDs (Star Citizen) Love this. This is the biggest technological quality of life enhancement in years.

This company is shaping the future of gaming. Getting your account set up can be difficult, but this company is still trying to ramp up.

I think ShadowPC gets unfair reviews, someone seeing 3.9 stars will think its bad. The reality is that ShadowPC is an investment, they are rolling out updates regularly. Currently you cannot play FPS shooter on the ipad (which is pretty much why I bought the services). However, I have been sticking with them for several months, and the updates give me strong hope that I will be able to play from my ipad pretty much anywhere anytime.

Looking forward!

I had initially subscribed to shadow in 2020, Im a user in Florida, I resubscribed in Sept. of 2021 with next day activation. I had very little issues using shadow on iOS and MacOS both times, I was very impressed on how smooth and reliable it is to stream a pc.

I give a 5 star rating cause im satisified overall with my experience. Only issues are due to starting up shadow, sometimes connection or loading time is halted for whatever reason but not too often it happens.

As this platform has just began and continues to become better, I fully support and recommend to those wanting to have access to a decent pc with limited resources.

I wanted an easy way to stream PC games to my phone. Shadow seemed perfect for me. Unfortunately my entire time has been an exercise of frustration. I'm tech savvy and have followed all the help articles to maximize my connection yet I still am having severe packet loss. Also randomly my shadow will not boot up properly and even using the shut down option won't seem to work. The only fix seems to be either waiting until it figures things out or just doing a full reset. Unfortunately to save money I entered into a 12 month commitment which means I'll be flushing money down the toilet the next year. If shadow worked it would be incredible. The few moments my packet loss would drop to playable levels gave me a glimpse of the future. While that future may be here for some who are closer to the data centers it isn't here for me. Just be aware when signing up you are taking a risk. For me it wasn't worth it.

I love this on the pc and my Mac. On the iPhone it works some times then stops. The issue I mainly have is the touch input. When the drivers update from switching from my laptop to my phone is when it works best. If I use shadow in my phone for multiple days on my phone it stops talking touch input and windows machine is basically useless. The only way to get it back that I have experienced is logging on my laptop let it update the drivers then log back on my phone which triggers another drivers update. My only guess is the suspend app or somewhere when I close ShadowPC leaves the drivers in a state it can’t recover from. If anything just add a button next to stop and restart shadow for update driver and I can reset the state on the go.

I’ve been using shadow for a very long time, and I’ve been using ShadowPC for about a year. Generally speaking shadow performs above and beyond what’s expected and the team of developers and support there work their tails off to provide an awesome experience. Currently though, with the shadow app, I no longer can use it because when u tap on my screen, it makes me click way higher and all the way to the left of my screen. So now I can’t ex out things or select places to type in to login to my accounts. My shadow on my laptop works fine, and I’ve done everything I could think of, but no solution is found.

To me the mobile client is mainly for use in a pinch. That said... if you want to play games this way you’re going to need to invest in an mfi controller anyway. I don’t even need to add any of the cool extras available to improve the mobile experience. Just leave steam running in big picture mode, for example and log in on my phone or tablet. The service can be played down as just another virtual PC and Remote Desktop but it’s not even comparable. It’s incredible. My primary computer is now a shadow. Accessible from all my devices. I don’t know what I’d do without it. Especially in summer when my razer blade strath with external GPU generates so much heat. Shadow to the rescue. ❤️

Being able to use ShadowPC on my phone/tablet to play games like FFXIV is just the best. The virtual controller is a boon, but it would have been a perfect five stars if we could move around or edit the elements. Since my phone has a virtual home button as a thin bar at the bottom the start and select buttons are nearly impossible to tap. Also if there was a way to disable mouse/touch while using the virtual controller would be helpful as the tap zones on the controls are minuscule. Overall having a virtual pc on the go is indescribably amazing and I’d highly recommend ShadowPC and service!

I turned to shadow when it became apparent that GPU’s would not be easily untrainable for some time, it was intended as a patchwork job in the mean time. Now I am playing fully modded play through of my favorite games, the versatility of having a tower level PC without needing to assign a place in the home for it is surprisingly comfortable. I still plan on my own build someday but I cannot recommend this enough to anyone caught in Limbo or finding it difficult to shell out the cash and patience a typical build would require. Kudos Team Shadow, this is a wonderful service you have here.

I love the convenience of shadow but unfortunately I live in an area that is limited to only Comcast service. While it’s fast enough to run shadow very well, comcast limits the service to 1tb a month and then charge $10 for each 50gb. With my households usual internet usage this leaves me about 300gb of extra bandwidth to use for shadow. That’s about 20hrs of gameplay at low streaming settings. So, in my case, this just doesn’t make sense over buying a good gaming device.

Until Comcast drops their data cap or we get some good competition in our area It just doesn’t make sense for me to use Shadow.

I live on a military base. I frequently move around the world. Lugging around a complete desktop is annoying in my situation. I had been using a competing service on my ipad to play games. The selection was limited and basically unplayable due to input lag and stuttering. So I try shadow. The input lag is minimal, streaming is smooth and you get all your games as it's a full windows machine. Basically turns my ipad into a powerful desktop. Really cool is that I can get gigabit speeds (base connections are usually quite slow). All I need is 10 mbps to stream it. Well worth the price

Everything was going well until iOS 13 was released. The Shadow application doesn’t work well on my iPhone. It doesn’t accept input, I’ve had to install another remote application to my Shadow. I’ve deleted ShadowPC from my device and reinstalled it, issue continued. I find it kinda silly that I use the Shadow app to start the Shadow and then use TeamViewer to actually use the Shadow. I don’t normally use my Shadow on my phone but I like to make sure Windows is up to date and all of my games are up to date while I’m away from my Host computer. I hope this issue is fixed in the future updates.

I really like shadow. Really cool to play AAA games on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If you have fast internet connection and like mess with lots of settings and tinker with stuff I recommend it. It’s a little bit pricy, $35 for what fees like a beta product. There are still a LOT of bugs. But I’m still having fun with it. In 1-2 years from now, I expect this service will be amazing. 1 feature request, can you add background audio support to iPhone and iPad? Would love to be able to play music, podcasts, picture in picture video, etc while playing. Right now shadow pauses background audio.

I am almost one month in with Shadow and I am very pleased with the service so far. I use it often on my iPad for design work. I was able to install all of my Creative Cloud apps without issue, and several other design/media editing applications that aren’t normally available on iPad. I haven’t experienced any connection issues during use.

It would be great if USB microphone support could be added on iPadOS. I have a Blue microphone that I normally use for recording on my iPad and I would really like access to it from within my Shadow PC.

Overall a good app, streaming is solid but ShadowPC is a bit janky. But Most importantly, I think ShadowPC lacks a major function of scrolling up and down (Usually is set to two fingers scrolling up and down in other apps), making using the streaming desktop quite painful since I constantly need to find the very thin scroll bar on the very right on a tiny screen. A virtual mousepad would also be nice.

Thought I would give this cloud gaming a try but it feels like a novelty. ShadowPC does connect to the virtual computer on their servers but that’s all I could do. Yep there is my windows desktop hey let’s play a little plants vs zombies from my desktop to my phone just to be funny. Nope crash. Huh restart plants vs zombies crash again. Ok let’s try Skyrim, it stutters so bad I had to restart the virtual pc as it would not exit. Ok for the ultimate in minimalist gaming, let’s try the solitaire that comes with windows 10 nope slow AF and can’t even play the first card, I’m done. Even if it did work how are you to play games made for the pc on a phone without a mouse and dedicated keyboard?

I have been going to the doctors and hospital for cancer diagnosis and honestly besides my girlfriend this makes me so happy to have while I’m in a hospital bed. It’s awesome to be able to game on an iPad and have full pc games. ShadowPC works beautifully with the steel series nimbus controller. Definitely recommended for the monthly price! This service isn’t perfect, but better then spending thousands of dollars on the same type of configuration along with mobile game on pretty much any device :)

Just finished playing some games with my Steelseries Nimbus. Worked flawlessly. Stream was great and experienced no hiccups. Only reason I’m giving 4/5 stars is until you can somehow enable cursor support. I know iOS doesn’t allow mouse support but I mean more like how teamviewer enables you to use a built in mouse to navigate windows. Would make the experience a lot better instead of having to pinch to zoom in. ShadowPC is solid besides that!

There are still a couple of bugs that seem to appear when establishing the server connection. ShadowPC will close out or appear in a lesser aspect ratio than before. The screen phases in and out of connection and my iPad seems in working order so I’m not going to believe it’d my device just yet. Having a mobile PC for gaming or other PC using aspects has been excellent. Especially since it’s the same pc you log into everywhere. Convenient

Shadow is good and I like using it on my MacBook, but the iOS / iPadOS apps are miserable.

Scrolling is just absurdly difficult. Their implementation is a joke.

The Chrome Remote Desktop apps mouse / input options are so superior that I find myself cursing ShadowPC every time I open it.

Worse is that even though they update ShadowPC regularly, these shortcomings haven’t budged in the 11 months I’ve been a paying customer.

I’d give the service overall 3.5/5, but ShadowPC is awful and I hate using it. Needs work but my confidence in the company is fading. Doesn’t help that I’m a second class citizen being in the US as they are EU first and we get products many months after they become available elsewhere. Eg: my 12 month sub is almost up and the storage expansion that was teased ages ago is STILL not available and won’t be until the new packages launch later next year... or so they say. 🙄

Game streaming has always interested me, and ShadowPC is definitely the best streaming service I’ve found so far. Games run great, I have little to no lag, and it even works with cellular data.

However, the only problem I could find is that when I play my games, it’s impossible to play them without an mfi controller. Please add a way to play games just using on screen controls like with the PlayStation remote play app.