Couchside turns your Android phone into the monitor, remote console, game launcher, and controller for your living-room Linux gaming PC — a SteamOS or Bazzite HTPC, a docked Steam Deck, or any systemd Linux box.
When the TV shows a black screen and the box seems dead, Couchside is the screen. See what's actually happening, read the logs, restart the display session, launch a game, or pick up a virtual controller — all from the couch, entirely on your own home network.
LIVE CONSOLE
A real-time dashboard of your box: CPU temperature, load averages, memory, per-disk usage, and uptime, plus the health of the systemd services you care about. When the box drops off the network, a clear "unreachable" banner tells you when it was last seen.
FIX IT WITHOUT A KEYBOARD
One-tap rescue actions, grouped by danger level and confirmed before they run:
• Restart the display session — the classic fix for a wedged gamescope black screen
• Switch to Desktop / Return to Game Mode — flip the box between Game Mode and a desktop session, no keyboard needed
• Reboot or power off
READ THE LOGS
Browse recent journald lines for any watched service straight from your phone. No SSH session, no laptop.
LAUNCH GAMES
The agent discovers the Steam games installed on the box, and the app shows them as a grid of cover art. Tap a cover and the game launches on the TV. Add your own custom launchers — a label and a command — for anything else the box runs, and remove them anytime.
BE THE CONTROLLER
The agent creates a genuine virtual Xbox 360 controller on the box, so Steam, Big Picture, and your games see real gamepad input. Three modes, one tap apart:
• Gamepad — dual analog sticks, D-pad, ABXY, bumpers, analog triggers
• Swipe — an Apple-TV-remote-style surface: swipe to move, tap to select. Perfect for Kodi and Big Picture menus
• Trackpad — relative-mouse control with tap-to-click, two-finger right-click, two-finger scroll, and light acceleration for desktop sessions
Plus an on-screen keyboard bar that types straight to the box, and haptic feedback throughout the app with a toggle in Settings.
EASY PAIRING
Install the open-source agent with one command; it prints a QR code. Scan it and the app opens with everything prefilled — the code is a couchside.tv/pair link, so it works straight from the Android camera. Manual host/port/token entry works too. If the box's .local name stops resolving (it happens in Game Mode), the app falls back to the last known IP automatically.
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
Couchside talks only to the agent on your own LAN. No cloud, no relay, no accounts, no analytics. Auth uses a bearer token stored securely on your phone; on the box, the agent's privileges are limited to an exact, audited allowlist of commands. The whole project — app and agent — is open source.
TRY FREE FOR 7 DAYS, PAY ONCE
Free to download with a full-featured 7-day trial — every screen, no account, no card. After the trial, a single one-time unlock keeps everything forever. No subscription, ever. Prefer to compile the app yourself from the public source? That's allowed and documented.
REQUIREMENTS
• A SteamOS, Bazzite, or other systemd-based Linux machine on your home network
• The free open-source Couchside agent installed on it (one command, no dependencies)
• Android phone and box on the same LAN
Recent changes:
New in 2.9.21
• Game cover art now shows on Android — it never did before.
• Search your games on the Launch tab, and fold away Stream from PC.
• Close the running game from your phone.
• New Steam search button: opens search on the box and brings up your keyboard.
• Storage now reports how full drives really are, and shows game drives like SD cards.
• Handhelds show battery draw, power profile, and time until full.
• Watch what your box is doing while it updates.
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