By Klaus Jakobsen, developer of A Decent Remote 
Nine photos, one hand holding the phone and the other holding the camera, which is the honest version of what this looks like. No mockups and no simulator: a real LG in a real living room, and the clock in the status bar is the real elapsed time.
Why send the search to the TV instead of just casting?
Casting is the better tool when you already know the video. You find it on the phone, tap the cast icon, and it plays.
Search is the case casting handles badly. Nobody knows which of the eight results they want until they see the thumbnails, and on a cast the thumbnails are on one person’s phone. Sending the phrase to the TV puts the results grid where everyone can see it, and the phone goes back to being just a keyboard.
The mechanical reason it works this way is worth knowing: TV platforms refuse outside text input inside streaming apps. YouTube on webOS or Fire TV accepts only its own on-screen letter grid. What every platform does allow is launching an app with parameters attached, which is how the TV’s own voice search works. A Decent Remote uses that same door, per platform. The longer version, including which platforms take the phrase and which only get YouTube opened, is in the YouTube search guide.
What happens between step 5 and step 6?
Pairing. The photos jump from opening the app to a remote that already says “LG TV” with a green dot, because that is a one-time setup you never repeat on that TV.
It is three taps and a PIN, and it has its own photographed walkthrough: pairing an iPhone with your TV, every step. If the app finds nothing at all when it scans, that is almost always the phone sitting on a guest network or a 5 GHz band the TV cannot see, and the TV not showing up guide walks through it.
Why is the app in Danish in the photos?
Because the phone is. The app follows whatever language the iPhone is set to, so the buttons you see as “Tastatur” and “Søg på YouTube” read “Keyboard” and “Search on YouTube” on an English phone, and the same in the other languages the app ships in. The layout and the button positions are identical, which is why the photos are still useful whatever your phone speaks.
Can I type anywhere else on the TV, or only into YouTube?
Both, with an important difference. Search fields outside streaming apps, meaning the TV’s own global search, login boxes and Wi-Fi passwords, take direct keyboard input on most platforms: you tap the field on the TV first, then type on the phone and the characters land.
Inside streaming apps, direct typing is blocked by the platform, and the YouTube search hand-off in this walkthrough is the workaround. Netflix has no equivalent door, which is covered honestly in typing into Netflix on a TV. Per-platform detail lives in the Roku typing guide and the Fire TV and Android TV typing guide.
