An old Android tablet is the best universal remote I've ever owned

When you have multiple TVs in the house and you start to pair them with smart TV boxes, keeping track of it all can be a nightmare. Universal TV remotes used to be more popular when you just needed an IR transmitter and TV interfaces were simple, but these days, interfaces are more complex, and there's more to consider.

The solution is quite simple, though. An old Android tablet I don't use anymore quickly became everything I needed to control my TVs with next to gaps in functionality. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

You don't need an IR transmitter

TVs are all internet-connected now

In the past, for your phone to be a universal TV remote, you'd need it to be one of the rare examples of a phone with a built-in IR transmitter. These days, though, the majority of TVs can connect to the internet, and you can use any phone to control them.

You can find multiple universal remote control apps on your favorite app store that let you take advantage of this capability and control all the TVs in your home relatively easily. I found this particular app from BoostVision to be the most functional on a tablet. A lot of these apps also seem to be designed for smaller phone screens, but this one adjusts pretty well to the larger tablet display.

With my LG TV, I can use D-pad controls or a virtual touchpad to move the on-screen pointer, but I also get volume buttons, quick navigation controls, and even access to my app list, so I can immediately jump into any app I want without navigating the UI on the TV itself. It's very useful. The big gap here is the ability to turn the TV on.

I wasn't able to find a free app with Wake-on-LAN support, so I still need to turn the TV on using the physical remote. Sadly, most of these apps can also be a bit slow to load, but the functionality is there, and it's very helpful.

Both of my TVs are LG-branded, but they are from different generations, and they run very different versions of webOS, and they both work just fine. I would imagine you can just as easily use a Samsung TV or any other brand, too.

It goes great with self-hosting, too

Home Assistant is the true universal remote

While you can use one of the many Play Store apps to control your TV remotely, I have to say that Home Assistant is easily the best way to control my TVs. The flip side to this is that deploying Home Assistant if you haven't already, plus configuring the necessary integrations, can take a lot more work than simply grabbing a Play Store app.

In the case of my LG models, I had to grab this project from the Home Assistant community, which gives me a full remote control for each of my TVs. Because I can fully customize the UI, I was able to squeeze two of these remotes onto the same page, so I can control either the bedroom TV or the living room TV without going back and forth in the UI. Plus, much like some of the dedicated apps, I can instantly jump into a specific app or input source without wading through slow TV menus. In that sense, it's actually much better than using a real remote.

The devices are also saved and the remotes are always shown, so I don't have to reconnect every time, and Home Assistant is also faster to load. With some extra configuration work, I can also get Wake-on-LAN support, though admittedly, I've only been able to get this to work with my bedroom TV, not the older model in my living room. I've heard this can work better if the TV is wired instead of using Wi-Fi, though I can't test this.

There's also a way to add an Android TV remote to Home Assistant, but this is something I admittedly haven't tried to do since it seems fairly complex. Other similar projects exist to help enable remote controls for other brands of TV, so it's worth exploring. That being said, this is a much more complex way to go about enabling remote controls, so I wouldn't blame you for sticking with the simpler solutions above.

At the same time, Home Assistant can control much more than TVs, so there are plenty of reasons to check it out.

Android TV has its own app

Sticking with something trusted

As I've already hinted, the apps above can also control an Android TV-based box like the one in my living room, but for Android TV, I think the official Google Home app is the best way to go. So, to control my Chromecast with Google TV, I added Google's Home app to my tablet as well.

The controls on the Google Home app are kind of basic, but I can do pretty much anything I want to do, and even if I didn't want to use the tablet as a standard remote, Android TV often asks me to use my phone if I want to type into any text field, so being able to do that on the same device makes things a lot easier.

Google Home also adds the currently playing media to my Android notifications, so I can easily play and pause, or even adjust the volume, even while I'm using other apps. All things considered, it's great.

My tablet is more useful than ever

I've often seen it said that every one must learn for themselves how useless a tablet can be, but by combining a couple of apps, I've found a new kind of purpose for this old tablet, and it now belongs right in my living room. Whether it's the TVs themselves or the set-top box I have in the living room, my tablet does it all, and I highly recommend trying this out for yourself if you have an old tablet lying around.