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Remote control gives you the phone’s screen in a browser tab, live, with your taps and keystrokes sent back to the handset. It is how you log an account in by hand, check what an automation left on screen, or clear a popup the phone is stuck on. It is a dashboard feature only. It is not part of the API or the MCP server, and it does not work while the Companion on the Mac is closed.

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Open a session

1

Find the phone on Fleet

Every card has a Remote Control button. A phone that is already publishing its screen shows a green bubble, tooltip “Streaming live”.
2

Press Remote Control

The viewer opens on its own page. The first frames take a moment: the browser is issued a short-lived viewing pass and then measures the streaming relays to pick the fastest one.
3

Press Esc when you are done

Or use Back, top left, to return to Fleet. Nothing needs to be stopped.
When the button is inert, its tooltip reads Remote Control unavailable and names the reason.
A phone whose slot has expired cannot be streamed at all: “Device slot has expired. Renew your slot to access streaming.” The viewer shows a blocked screen with Renew Slot or Assign a Slot instead of a picture. See Your fleet.

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What you can do in the viewer

The remote control page showing a live phone screen in the centre, a Back button and Video live and Control live chips in the header, tiles labelled Control, Pinch, Send keys, Volume and Stream down one side, and a right-hand panel with Queue and Run tabs

A live remote control session.

Two chips in the header tell you whether it is working. The video chip reads Video off, Video connecting, Video live, Video stalled, Video reconnecting or Video down. The control chip reads Control offline, Control connecting or Control live. You need both live before the phone reacts to you. The tiles around the screen are: The right-hand panel has Queue and Run tabs: what this phone is working through, and what you can start on it right now.
There is no screenshot button and no rotate control. Landscape is detected from the video itself, not something you switch on.

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Two people, one phone

There is no lock. Several people can open the same phone at the same time, and all of them can tap it. Nobody is told that anyone else is there, and nothing warns you that a second pair of hands is fighting you for the screen. Stream quality and frame rate are shared too. Change them, and everyone watching that phone gets the new setting. If someone reports a phone “moving on its own”, the first question is who else has it open, and the second is whether an automation is running on it.

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What the run panel costs

Watching and driving a phone needs a live slot and nothing else. It is not a MAX feature. Starting an automation from inside the viewer is a MAX feature. Without the licence the panel wears a Max required chip with the tooltip “Automations require Autogrowth MAX”, and each run button reads Unlock instead of Run. See Credits and billing.

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Errors you will actually see

The viewer is chatty on purpose — it retries almost everything by itself.
Capture stops when nobody is watching. About 30 seconds after the last viewer leaves, the Companion stops pulling frames from the phone, and starts again for the next viewer. A phone that “went dark” between sessions is behaving correctly.

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GrapheneOS phones

GrapheneOS phones stream and are controllable in the same viewer, with Back and Recent Apps added to the arrow pad and a Profile switcher for the phone’s identities. A locked profile shows an overlay — Unlocking…, Locked — unlock it by hand, or Locked — auto-unlock failed — depending on whether a keyguard PIN is saved for it. They cannot run automations. See Android phones.

Your fleet

Status words, slots and who can see which phone.

Automations

What the phones can be told to do on their own.