Use the iPhone as a Remote for your Apple TV

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can use our iPhone as an Apple TV remote. You may find this useful when you lose that little remote that the Apple TV comes with. Let’s see how it can use the iPhone as an Apple TV remote. Let’s go to my iPhone.

To control our Apple TV with our iPhone, we first need to add the Apple TV control, or the Apple TV remote, to the control center. How do we do that? We need to go to our Settings app, and then what we do is go to Control Center.

Under Control Center, you’re going to see Included Controls. These are all the controls that are included in the Control Center. Well, by default, the Apple TV control is not included in the Control Center. So what we need to do is swipe up until you see More Controls. One of the controls that we can add is an Apple TV remote. To add it, we just tap on the green plus. And now we have our Apple TV remote. You can reposition it within the control center by dragging these three horizontal lines around. I’m just going to leave it where it’s at.

Let’s swipe up from the bottom, and now I’m back at my home screen. Now what I want to do is I want to control or use my iPhone as a remote to control my Apple TV. Maybe I lost my remote. I can’t find where it’s at. It’s buried in the couch. Well, to use your iPhone as a remote, now we just go to our control center. I go to the upper right-hand corner. I swipe down, and then you’re going to see a new control here. It looks like a little remote control. When I tap on it, my iPhone turns into a remote control. The first thing I need to do is just select the Apple TV I want to control. On the Apple TV is going to be a number that you have to type in. I type in that number, and now I can use my iPhone as a remote for my Apple TV.

Now it’s hard to see on the screen here. You’re going to see it’s a little bit light gray here. But this part here is the trackpad. I swipe around with my finger, and it’s going to swipe around on the Apple TV. I have my voice control, play, and pause. I can go to my menu. I can search as well as hit the TV button.

Now let’s say you didn’t want to swipe around here. You can add directional controls here instead of swiping. To do that, we go back over to our Settings app. So I’m going to swipe up from the bottom. We’re going to get out of the control center. And now I’m going to go to my Settings app. From here, we go over our Accessibility options. This is an accessibility feature. And then when we swipe up, you’re going to see we have an Apple TV remote.

When I tap on this, I’m able to add directional buttons. Let’s go ahead and turn this on and let’s go back over to my remote. How do I do that? A swipe down from the upper right-hand corner to go to my control center. And then I tap on the remote here. And we can see now that instead of using gestures, I can now just tap around on my iPhone. I can also easily go back ten seconds and go forward 10 seconds, and I can easily turn on closed captioning.

So that’s how we can use our iPhone as a remote for our Apple TV. This is all done through the Control Center. So we need to add the Apple TV control to our Control Center. We do this through the Settings app under Control Center. Once we add it to our Control Center, all we need to do to remote control our Apple TV is just go to our Control Center on the iPhone. If you want to use directional buttons instead of swiping, you can go to the accessibility options under Settings. Then you’ll see Apple TV remote, and you can turn on directional buttons.

So that’s how we can use our iPhone as a remote for our Apple TV.