Use Your Phone as a PC Remote with Unified Remote

Reaching for the TV remote to play/pause shaves off a lot of time and energy between getting up to the TV and back in the middle of a movie, and that's exactly why we have the remotes now. When you are watching from your PC connected to your TV, however, there isn't any actual remote for that, and so you're back to square one, but it doesn't have to be so with virtual remotes like Unified Remote.

With Unified Remote, you can control your PC from your smartphone. It's great for movies, presentation slides, and pretty much anything you don't want to have to get to your PC to do. You simply install the necessary things on your mobile phone and PC, and everything afterwards is intuitive. It's available on Android, iOS, and Microsoft phones. And it works on Windows and Mac OS.

Installing the Server and App

To pair your smartphone with your PC, you need to have the mobile app installed on your smartphone and the server installed on the PC. To begin, visit the Unified Remote webpage and download the latest mobile app versions for your smartphone OS.

Down the page, you will find where to download the server for your PC—Windows, Mac, or Linux. After the file download is complete, install the setup. You may need to restart the PC afterwards; the PC will inform you if that's required.

Pairing Your Smartphone and PC

You can pair your devices via WiFi and Bluetooth. To begin, you need to launch the software (or server) on your PC. You can simply search for it on your taskbar. If it says "Another instance of Unified Remote is running," then the Unified Remote server on your PC is already running and you can proceed to your phone for pairing.

If you would like to connect over wifi, you need to connect your smartphone and PC to the same wifi network. Connecting the PC to the phone's wifi hotspot can be done if connecting to a router or mifi isn't an option. If Bluetooth is what you'd like, then simply pair the devices in the phone and PC settings first.

The next thing to do is move on to connect to your PC's server on your smartphone. If the mobile app doesn't prompt you to connect to a server upon opening it, then simply go to the menu at the top left corner and go to servers.

After successfully linking them both to the preferred connection, wifi or Bluetooth, you should find a server available. You may find more than one server if you have your PC and phone connected to the same WiFi network and over Bluetooth. Connect to your preferred network by choosing your PC's name. For me, it's Spaceship-Jaytron.

When you successfully pair your phone and PC, you can go on to use the available remotes on the app. The ones I frequently use are Basic Input for mouse control, Keyboard for typing—which also allows me to type on my phone's keyboard and have it reflect on the PC's screen—and Media for play/pause and volume controls.

There are actually more remotes available to use, like screen viewers and Netflix remotes. You can find them by exploring the Plus (+) button. You will find, however, that many of them are only available in the Full version. The Unified Remote Full is a paid app, however, but you can simply find a mod version for free online. Here is where I downloaded the (.apk) version that I use. This is only for Android OS.

_{Using Screen Viewer on Unified Remote}

You can also connect multiple remotes on your mobile phones and iPads to your PC and control your PC from any one of them at any time.

There are other kinds of virtual remotes, like Unified Remote, available, but I have been content with this one for four years now.