The remote you lost, already in your pocket

Android TV and Google TV devices — televisions, set-top boxes and streaming sticks that run them. That covers Sony, Philips, TCL, Hisense, Sharp and Xiaomi Android TV sets, Chromecast with Google TV, NVIDIA SHIELD TV, Mi Box and similar hardware.

It does not work with Roku, Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, Amazon Fire TV or Apple TV. Those use different, closed protocols.

No. The remote talks to your television directly over your home Wi-Fi and never through the internet, so both devices simply have to be on the same network. It does not work over mobile data, because your television is not reachable from there.

On the free tier the app does contact Google's ad servers to fetch advertisements. That is the only thing in the app that reaches the internet at all, and Pro removes it.

Put both devices on the same Wi-Fi and open TV Remote. It lists the televisions it finds — tap yours. The television displays a six-character code on screen; type that into the phone and you are paired. It is remembered, so you only do it once per television.

Both devices have to be on the same Wi-Fi network, and that network has to allow devices to see each other. Guest networks and some routers block that deliberately — the setting is usually called AP isolation or client isolation.

If you cannot change it, use Enter IP address: read the address off your television under Settings › Network and type it in. That path is always available and never gated.

The television shows the code full-screen, so anything already on screen can hide it — a screensaver, a game, or an app in the foreground. Press Home on the television, then start pairing again.

Some televisions drop stored pairings when they update, and a few only keep a small number at once — pairing another phone can push this one out. Pairing again takes a few seconds and nothing else is lost.

Yes. Discovery, pairing, the whole remote face, the keyboard, voice search, app shortcuts, photo casting and audio casting are free forever and are not time-limited. The free tier shows advertisements.

TV Remote Pro is a single $1.99 payment that removes the ads and unlocks video casting, the Android home-screen widget, unlimited saved televisions, automations and Android screen mirroring. It is a one-time purchase — not a subscription — and nothing renews.

The remote collects nothing. Your televisions, their pairing credentials, your layout and every button you press stay on the phone. There is no account, no server and no analytics backend.

On the free tier, Google's advertising SDK collects the data listed in our privacy policy in order to choose advertisements. Pro removes the ads and that collection with them.

Yes — photos, music and video, sent from the phone straight to the television over your Wi-Fi. The file is served by your own phone and is never uploaded anywhere.

Photos and music are free. The first video cast is free too, so you can prove it works on your television before paying; unlimited video casting is part of Pro. Supported formats are MP4, M4V and WebM for video, MP3, M4A, AAC, FLAC and WAV for audio, and JPG, PNG, GIF and WebP for pictures. MKV and AVI are refused up front rather than failing to a black screen.

On Android, yes: the home-screen widget is a working D-pad with volume, home and back keys that sends presses without launching the app, and a Quick Settings tile opens the remote from the notification shade.

On iPhone the widget opens the remote in one tap but cannot send presses itself. iOS does not reliably permit a widget's network calls while the host app is closed, so a press-from-the-widget feature would fail more often than it worked. We would rather say so than sell it.

No. TV Remote works over Wi-Fi, not infrared. Almost no modern phone has an IR blaster, and you do not need to point the phone at the television — it works from another room, as long as you are on the same network.

Not always, and the limit is the hardware rather than the app. Sets connected by Ethernet — an NVIDIA SHIELD, for example — wake reliably. Televisions on Wi-Fi usually cut the radio in deep power-off and cannot hear the wake packet at all, and most streaming dongles do not support it. Where a manufacturer offers a setting for it, it is named something like "Remote start", "Screenless service" or "Network standby".