Launched this week
PhoneDeck
Turn your iPhone into a free Mac controller
302 followers
Turn your iPhone into a free Mac controller
302 followers
You already own a StreamDeck. It's your iPhone. PhoneDeck turns your iPhone into a fully customizable Mac controller, media controls, app launcher, custom buttons, all on your phone's screen. No hardware. No subscription. Free. Built by a solo developer in 7 days because I needed it myself. Works out of the box. No setup headaches. Download Now: Phonedeck.io
PhoneDeck
the graveyard of phone as controller apps is full of tools that died the moment the screen locked or ios killed the background app. how does PhoneDeck survive those two? does the connection hold with the phone screen off? and since it is free with no subscription, what keeps it maintained six months from now when apple ships an os update that breaks something? solo dev in 7 days is impressive but the 7 months after is what i am curious about.
Genuinely curious how you're keeping this free long term. Solo dev, no subscription... is the plan to monetize some other way later, or is this just a passion project you're fine running at a loss on?
How does the connection actually work, WiFi only or Bluetooth too? Latency matters a lot for media controls or trigger buttons during a screen share.
Dune's already doing context aware Mac automation and Keyboard Maestro's the heavy weight for scripting workflows. What's PhoneDeck's actual lane here. Is it meant to be the simpler, more casual layer on top or a real alternative to those?
"No setup headaches" is the part that will make this or break this for me. Every Mac controller app I've tried needs some combo of permissions or network config that breaks the first time your router restarts. If it actually just works out the box that's worth the download by itself.
The obvious trade off vs a dedicated StreamDeck is that your phone's now tied up as a controller instead of free for other stuff, and you need somewhere to prop it. Not a dealbreaker but worth weighing against the "free" part.