By Klaus Jakobsen, developer of A Decent Remote Every number below comes from the app’s own App Store product page, read on 6 September 2026 in the US store. Prices are the ones Apple shows under In-App Purchases, so you can check any of them in about ten seconds.
One disclosure before the table: A Decent Remote is ours, and it is first because it is the cheapest by the measure we chose, which is exactly the kind of thing you should be suspicious of. So the measure is stated up front, applies to all ten identically, and every competing number is a link away from being verified.
The ranking
Ranked by cheapest yearly plan. The second price column is the plan Apple lists first on the product page, which is the slot the most-bought purchase occupies.
| # | App | Developer | Cheapest year | Listed first | That plan, one year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Decent Remote | Klaus Jakobsen | $14.99 | Monthly $3.99 | $47.88 |
| 2 | TV Remote - Universal Control | EVOLLY.APP | $19.99 | Weekly $6.99 | $363.48 |
| 3 | TV Remote - Universal | Zap Software Studio | $19.99 | Weekly $4.99 | $259.48 |
| 4 | Universal TV Remote Control | SEAMOBI TECH | $19.99 | Weekly $8.99 | $467.48 |
| 5 | Universal Remote TV Control | BEGAMOB GLOBAL | $26.49 | Weekly $9.99 | $519.48 |
| 6 | Universal TV Remote Control | TOGGLE APPS | $29.99 | Weekly $6.99 | $363.48 |
| 7 | Universal Remote TV Control | Desidari holding | $29.99 | Weekly $6.99 | $363.48 |
| 8 | TV Remote, Universal Control | Fiision Studio | $29.99 | Weekly $4.99 | $259.48 |
| 9 | Universal TV Remote | KRAFTWERK 9 | $34.99 | Weekly $2.99 | $155.48 |
| 10 | TV Remote & Universal Control | To Ngoc Mai | $39.99 | $9.99, duration not stated | not calculable |
Read the last two columns together and the category gives itself away. Nine of these ten apps sell a weekly plan, and eight of those nine put it first on the listing. The ninth leads with a purchase that does not say what it is. The gap between the two price columns is the whole business model: the yearly plan is the honest price, the weekly plan is the one that gets sold.
The ten, with the first three screenshots from each listing
1. A Decent Remote, $14.99 a year
$3.99 a month or $14.99 a year. 43 MB. No advertising. Ours. Thirteen brands, free for the first 50 button presses so pairing is proven before any money changes hands, and no weekly plan on purpose. It is also the newest and smallest app here by a wide margin, with a rating count in single digits against the others’ tens of thousands, which is a real disadvantage and not one worth hiding in a table.
2. TV Remote - Universal Control, EVOLLY.APP, $19.99 a year
Weekly $6.99 or $4.99, monthly $8.99, yearly $19.99 or $39.99, lifetime $44.99. 197 MB. Discloses advertising. The biggest app in the category by review count at roughly 606,000 ratings, and the only one here running six live price points at once. The $19.99 year is genuinely competitive; almost nobody is on it, because the $6.99 week is what the product page offers first.
3. TV Remote - Universal, Zap Software Studio, $19.99 a year
Weekly $4.99, yearly $19.99. 65 MB. Discloses advertising. The simplest price list in the set: one weekly, one yearly, nothing else. It is also the second smallest app here, and it was updated the day before this article was written. Two plans and 65 MB is a tidier operation than most of this list.
4. Universal TV Remote Control, SEAMOBI TECH, $19.99 a year
Weekly $8.99 or $4.99, yearly $28.99 or $19.99, lifetime $29.99. 250 MB. Discloses advertising. The largest download in this comparison, at 250 MB, for an app that sends short commands over Wi-Fi. Two parallel price ladders run side by side, the “Pro” one and the “V1” one, and which you see is not something you control.
5. Universal Remote TV Control, BEGAMOB GLOBAL, $26.49 a year
Eight different weekly prices, from $3.99 to $14.90. Yearly $26.49 or $29.99. 237 MB. Discloses advertising. This listing carries the widest price spread we found anywhere in the category. $14.90 a week is $774.80 a year for an app whose own yearly plan is $26.49, a 29x difference between two ways of buying the same thing. Eight simultaneous weekly SKUs is not a pricing accident, it is a running experiment on which number converts.
6. Universal TV Remote Control, TOGGLE APPS, $29.99 a year
Weekly $6.99 individual or $8.99 family, yearly $29.99, lifetime $39.99. 177 MB. No advertising disclosed. One of only three apps in this comparison that does not declare advertising, and one of two that splits plans into individual and family tiers. The lifetime unlock at $39.99 pays for itself against the weekly plan in six weeks.
7. Universal Remote TV Control, Desidari holding, $29.99 a year
Weekly $6.99, $5.99 or $4.99, monthly $9.99, yearly $39.99 or $29.99, pro pack $14.99. 172 MB. No advertising disclosed. Ten in-app purchases, several with near-identical names at different prices. The lowest rating in this group at 4.27, which for a category where 4.5 is normal is worth a look at the reviews before subscribing.
8. TV Remote, Universal Control, Fiision Studio, $29.99 a year
Weekly $4.99, monthly $7.99 or $6.99, yearly $34.99 or $29.99, lifetime $39.99. 121 MB. Discloses advertising and user-generated content. The one app here that offers every cadence at once: weekly, monthly, yearly and lifetime, all live. If you want the subscription ladder in a single screenshot, this is it.
9. Universal TV Remote, KRAFTWERK 9, $34.99 a year
Weekly $2.99 or $5.99, monthly $6.99, yearly $34.99, lifetime $14.99. 95 MB. Discloses advertising. The oldest app in this comparison, on the store since 2018, and the only one whose lifetime unlock ($14.99) costs less than half its own yearly plan ($34.99). That is not a bargain hiding in plain sight so much as a sign of prices set at different times and never reconciled.
10. TV Remote & Universal Control, To Ngoc Mai, $39.99 a year
Ten in-app purchases, six of them named “Remote Control for Smart TV” with no duration, at $6.99 and $9.99. Yearly $39.99. 211 MB. Discloses advertising. The most expensive cheapest-year in the set, and the only listing where the plan Apple shows first does not say what you are buying. A purchase named “Remote Control for Smart TV, $9.99” could be a week, a month or forever, and the product page will not tell you which.
What thirty screenshots tell you
Line them up and things appear that no price table shows.
Four of the ten open with a wall of TV brand logos rather than the app: ours, EVOLLY, Desidari and KRAFTWERK 9. That is the category’s honest instinct, because the only question a buyer has is whether their television is in the list.
Two open with rendered plastic remote controls, six of them, in colours, floating on a gradient: BEGAMOB and TOGGLE APPS. SEAMOBI does the same thing one slide later. It works, because a person who has just lost a remote recognises the object faster than a screenshot of a keypad. It is also the clearest signal in the category about what is being sold: an app confident in its interface leads with its interface.
Look at BEGAMOB’s slides two and three next to TOGGLE APPS’ slides two and three. Same layout, same callout boxes in the same positions, same headings (“All in One”, “For Any TV”), different palette. Two unrelated developers, two of the largest apps in the category, one template.
Fiision opens with three rendered living rooms stitched into a panorama, and the headline on the first one reads “One app. All your Samsung TVs” for an app sold as universal. Only Zap and KRAFTWERK 9 show unedited captures of the app itself, no caption bar, no callouts, just the screen you would actually be looking at. Both are also among the three smallest downloads here, which is probably not a coincidence.
The weekly plan, in one paragraph
Weekly billing is not a discount structure, it is a forgetting tax. The prices in this article, annualised: $155, $259, $259, $363, $363, $363, $467, $519, and at the top of BEGAMOB’s ladder, $774. Every one of those apps also sells a yearly plan between $19.99 and $39.99 that does the identical job. The weekly plan exists because it reads cheap for one charge and renews fifty-two times, and because a person who subscribed to find their remote in March is often still paying in October.
If you take one thing from this page: before you subscribe to any remote app, look at its yearly plan. It is on the same paywall, usually smaller, and in this set it is between 4x and 29x cheaper than the plan you were shown first.
How we picked these ten
The selection rule, so you can reproduce it:
- Searched the US App Store for the category’s five main queries and pooled 106 apps.
- Removed single-brand apps. The Roku app, Amazon Fire TV, SmartThings, LG ThinQ, Rokie, RoByte and Reforo are all excellent and all free, and if your house has one brand of screen they are the right answer. They are not universal remotes, so they are not in this comparison. Details in our brand-by-brand guide.
- Sorted the remainder by review count, as the closest public proxy for install base.
- Removed apps whose in-app purchase names do not state a duration, which cannot be ranked by price honestly. One app was dropped this way: Universal remote tv smart by yohan teixeira, 42,761 ratings, whose plans are named only “Premium version” at $7.99, $9.99 and $29.99.
- Took the top nine that remained, and added ours as the tenth.
Prices, sizes, ratings and advertising disclosures were read from the US App Store product pages on 6 September 2026. Apple runs price experiments in this category constantly, so a listing may show you a number that is not in the table above. That is the finding, not an error.
What this article does not tell you
Price is the easy part to verify and the least important thing about a remote app. Whether it connects to your specific television is the entire product, and no comparison table can establish that from outside. What you can do is refuse to pay until it is proven: install, pair, press some buttons, and only then look at the paywall. Any app that reverses that order is telling you something.
Our own answer to that is 50 free button presses rather than a countdown trial, so the free part is an evening on the couch instead of a clock running down while you are at work. If you would like to see how pairing actually goes on your brand first, the pairing walkthrough is photographed end to end.
