The physical Apple TV remote has a remarkable knack of finding its way between sofa cushions. It’s a slippery fish. And the iOS app version, well it’s ok in a pinch, but it’s hardly intuitive for effective streaming.
Apple doesn’t have an official Mac app – which for my purposes would be far more efficient than the iPhone app – but this third party option looks like a bit of a godsend for whiling away the hours flipping between the apps as I write about tech.
The third-party app is called ItsytV actually looks like it might be a superior option to the others. It looks like there’ll be less need to go back and forth through the homepage to select the apps.
When paired with the Apple TV via a pin, the remote shows a list of the available apps, which can be selected with a click. All of the other controls are listed – like play, pause, and volume – as they are on the physical remote.
There are also shortcuts to Arcade, Movies, Fitness, FaceTime, the App Store and other Apple TV staples. There’s also a helpful Now Playing screen. And, if you have multiple Apple TVs on the same network, you can access a remote for each of them. The app isn’t available through the App Store. You have to download and install it via GitHub. It’s free to download too.
It’s not nefarious or anything like that. It’s built to be native to macOS and is built with Swift and SwiftUI. And it just runs silently in the menu bar. It also enables you to type search queries on your actual keyboard rather than messing about with the physical remote or the touchscreen interface on the iOS remote interface. It’s also end-to-end encrypted with the Apple TV with the pairing credentials stored in Keychain.
