Installing TeamViewer without root/admin on MacOS

How to install TeamViewer .pkg on a Mac without admin privileges ☺️

See also this article.

It used to be so easy to connect to someone's computer using TeamViewer, because TeamViewer used to provide a Chrome app, however after 2022 they don't provide that anymore, and when downloading TeamViewer, we are presented with an Install TeamViewer.app that requires admin privileges to install.

There is a solution

First, copy Install TeamViewer.app from inside the .dmg to your home folder. Now we can extract the .pkg file within:

pkgutil --expand-full Install\ TeamViewer.app/Contents/Resources/Install\ TeamViewer.pkg TeamViewer-extracted/

ls TeamViewer-extracted

Notice how the TeamViewer-extracted folder contains a lot of crap: 💩

AuthPluginPackage.pkg/ RemotePrintingPackage.pkg/ Distribution Resources/ FullEnforceUIVersionPackage.pkg/ TeamViewerApp.pkg/ FullSilentInstallerPackage.pkg/ UninstallerAppPackage.pkg/ PriviledgedHelperPackage.pkg/ UninstallerHelperPackage.pkg/ RemoteAudioDriverPackage.pkg/

We don't need any of those. Instead we will just grab the TeamViewer.app from inside TeamViewerApp.pkg:

mv TeamViewer-extracted/TeamViewerApp.pkg/Payload/TeamViewer.app ~/Desktop/

Then we can simply run our admin privilege-free TeamViewer.app without installing any of the other invasive stuff and we can flush the rest of it down the 🚽

rm -rf TeamViewer-extracted