ATV Desktop Remote For Mac

While you can control your Apple TV from the classic remote or your iOS or iPadOS device, what if you find a MacBook to be more convenient? Perhaps you like to do some work while watching TV, and switching from your Mac every time you want to change something just makes things more difficult.

If that is the case, ATV Desktop Remote offers a potential solution to your problem. It allows you to control your TV directly from your Mac's menu bar, thus keeping context switching to a minimum. It features a simple UI and is created with Electron, which isn't quite ideal, but it does the job.

To start with, you need to pair the app with an Apple TV. Once that is done, you will see the main UI with the remote layout, and you will be able to use the keyboard to control it. If you're not sure which button does what, just hold ⌥ (Option) to see the bindings.

You can use the ⌘⇧R hotkey to bring up the UI, which can also be configured to always be displayed on top of other windows. Unsurprisingly, the app comes with support for Light and Dark mode, which you can toggle from the menu bar.