Completely Uninstall Apple Remote Desktop macOS Sierra 10.12.4

Question

ARD or "Apple Remote Desktop" (Ver 3.8) is a necessary evil for me to tunnel into my workstation at the office. Please keep in mind, I am able to successfully connect to my VPN, it's the ARD software that fails here.

After successful login to my VPN I go to open ARD and am met with this lovely message:

"The Remote Desktop administrator software does not match the installed client software version. The Remote Desktop administrator software must be upgraded on this computer. Click “Check for Updates” to search for updated software."

The most fun I'm having here is that there are NO updates available for the product -- and -- I can not even go to the "preferences" panel for ARD while this warning is present. It's in a "disabled state".

That being said, when I click "Check for Updates" -- It closes ARD, opens the App Store and states "No Updates Available". Notice my only other option above is to "Quit" so, I'm kind of stuck here.

Note: Both workstations are indeed running the same exact OS and "Apple Remote Desktop" versions.

A potential caveat is that I did not pay for this software. I logged into the client's iTunes account from my own iTunes and downloaded accordingly. This has not been an issue in the past, but could be why this is happening?

With no real way that I'm aware of to even begin to debug this issue, I'm really lost. Some R&D led me to this post stating that this is a known issue but -- no answers that seem to help me (because I can't fully uninstall the program).

Getting to my long winded point -- about removing the software -- After I found the developer page where I could download the software outside of the iTunes store, I thought maybe a uninstall/reinstall would help resolve this issue. Problem is, I can not uninstall ARD for the life of me. I also can not find helpful articles on how to REMOVE ARD completely from a Mac computer.

Every time I think I have it uninstalled, I go to re-install and get an error message saying that a newer version already exists on my workstation and I have to cancel the install.

This is telling me that I am not fully uninstalling ARD from my iMac at all. Otherwise, I would be able to install the updated software available and mentioned in the above link.

Because I did my homework, this is how Apple recommends you remove ARD, although, this clearly does not work. There is an older article out there from 2011 and that did not work either. So, how to completely uninstall ARD from Sierra OS? Or, has anyone else had this issue and fixed?

EDITED: Feb 22, 2017

Apple -- just today -- released "Apple Remote Desktop" Ver. 3.9 This version works much better and if you have this problem now, make sure to download 3.9.

Solution 1

macOS 10.12.4 is only a public beta at this time.

Congratulations, your beta testing has successfully found a bug. Please report it to Apple via bugreport.apple.com.

I would guess there's an ARD Admin update due to coincide with the real release of macOS 10.12.4, but perhaps there's no public beta for ARD Admin at this time. There appears to be a private beta for people in the developer program. Does that include you? If so, go get the ARD admin beta.

Otherwise your best bet is probably to downgrade to macOS 10.12.3, the last real public production release of macOS Sierra. The ARD agent in that release probably matches with the ARD admin that's publicly available.

Solution 2

That worked for me:

Disable System Integrity Protection

Delete /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement

Edit /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist - change OS version to 10.10.6

Download and install ARD Client 3.8.5.1

Revert OS version to 10.12.4

Solution 3

I had the same problem and thanks to your answer I found out I'm running on Beta. I'm 100% sure I disabled it through the Software Update pref pane long time ago, but somehow the beta installed automatically and I didn't even know about it. Well, okay, at least I can try out the Night Shift mode.. Thanks.

Comments

[ben.kaminski]

Thanks @Spiff, makes sense and I'll give that a shot. Thanks for the info and I'll try the downgrade of the OS and report back. I should have mentioned that I am part of the Beta testing program so that's probably why all of my updates are "beta" and not a stable release.

[ben.kaminski]

Unfortunately due to proxy rules and a mostly Windows based network, that's a long shot.