Make your gaming box feel more like yours. • Optional SteamOS Themes (Beta): choose seven home layouts, including Crossbar and Horizon, or create your own with Theme Studio. Restore Steam default at any time. Requires an updated Couchside service and Decky companion. • Lighting improvements for supported devices, with scene controls and clearer hardware capability limits. • Hidden boxes stay out of the quick selector. • Optional Player prototype: try a sample film on your TV, with fullscreen playback, phone controls, and clearer playback errors. Includes service compatibility and reliability improvements.

Wake your gaming box directly from your iPhone. Couchside uses Apple's approved local-network multicast capability to send Wake-on-LAN packets immediately, with visible progress and relay fallback. Wake support depends on your network and hardware settings; allow Local Network access when prompted. Couch Mode now clearly separates TV-control warnings from Game Mode readiness. When you're using a handheld's built-in screen, it explains that audio stays on the box instead of reporting an audio failure. Update the Linux service to 2.9.133 for secure-connection responsiveness, safer file-upload handling, and a clearer explanation when automatic TV input switching is unavailable.

Welcome to a smoother Couchside. A new welcome guide explains the project and helps you pair your first box, with optional Steam, IsThereAnyDeal and Decky setup guidance. Your Boxes screen combines live vitals and management in one card. Refined animations respect your Preferences and Reduce Motion setting, and swipe navigation avoids sliders and other touch controls. Wake Box now shows progress, elapsed time and connection confirmation. Ethernet wake detection and faster relay handling improve waking supported machines. Custom lighting adds clearer sequence timing and real strobe effects. Updated Wake devices settings verify saves and explain when persistence is available. Update the Linux service to 2.9.129 for the matching wake and lighting improvements. Wake support depends on your network and hardware settings. This update also keeps setup guidance visible when a box is asleep, restores optional features after temporary connection failures, and improves Suspend availability after reconnecting.

A new Play tab helps you choose what to play next, with a now-playing card, Steam library stats, achievement progress, wishlist discounts and optional sample-data mode. Connect Steam and optionally IsThereAnyDeal on your box for price-drop alerts and historical-low comparisons. These optional features use their respective online services. Game Aura adds artwork-inspired lighting and per-game presets on supported LED hardware. Expanded strip controls include reactive meters and a playtime countdown. This release also makes Play faster to revisit, fixes excessive background requests that could delay controls, and prevents expired queued commands from being sent. Agent 2.9.128 improves Steam refreshes, temporary network failures and account switching.

• Open your media apps from your phone — Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, Moonlight, VLC and Spotify launch straight from Couchside, now even in Steam's Game Mode. • Live network speed on the Console, alongside CPU, memory and temperatures. • Copy something on the box, paste it on your phone. • Turn your phone sideways on the Pad for a laptop-style trackpad and keyboard. • Arm a controller to wake the box from sleep. • More Steam settings shortcuts, and a smoother way to add non-Steam apps (plus Windows fixes).

A new opening animation — the Couchside couch, with its live green dot, greets you on launch. Plus a calmer, more customizable interface: - The Console opens to a compact vitals strip — temperature, load and memory at a glance, with the full detail a tap away. - Reorder or hide cards on the Fleet and Actions tabs too: press and hold a card, or tap the sliders icon. The same customize gesture the Console already had. - A shorter, friendlier first-run tour. - Tidier Settings, with the polling controls grouped on their own. Plus polish and reliability fixes throughout.

Manage Decky Loader from your phone. Install, repair, update or remove Decky Loader on your box, browse and install plugins from the official Decky store, and see what's installed — all from Setup, without leaving the couch. (Turn it on once on the box; the app tells you how.) New too: - Skins — give the Console a whole new shape in Setup → Appearance. Six looks, from the quiet "Studio" to the machined "Panel", each shown as a live preview and layered on top of your colour pack and accent. - An optional alarm pulse that flags a hot vital from the corner of your eye. Coming from an older version? You also get theme packs (OLED Black, Steam, Nord, Dracula and more), a calmer Console that opens to what's happening now, "Did you know" tips, card reorder on every tab, and an auto-drop option so the phone can't take player one mid-game. Plus polish and reliability fixes — including a secure connection that heals itself after a box update, so the app no longer sits reconnecting until you reboot.

Make the app your own. The customize gesture that was on the Console tab now works on the Fleet and Actions tabs too: tap the sliders icon in the corner (or press and hold any card) to reorder cards and hide the ones you don't use. Your layout is remembered. Coming from an older version? This update also brings: - Theme packs — give the whole app a new look: OLED Black (true black for OLED screens), Steam, Nord, Dracula, Solarized, High Contrast and more, in Setup → Appearance. - A calmer Console that opens to what's happening right now, with lights, display and tools tucked behind one "More" tap. - "Did you know" tips that gently point out features you might have missed — one at a time, never naggy. - Auto-drop the pad: an option so that, while a game is running, your phone stops acting as a controller and can't take player one from your real gamepad. Plus polish and reliability fixes throughout.

Theme packs — give the whole app a new look. Choose OLED Black (true black, made for OLED screens), Steam, Nord, Dracula, Solarized, High Contrast and more in Setup → Appearance. The accent picker still layers on top. A calmer Console — it opens to what's happening right now (media, streaming, a running game, your box's vitals), with lights, display, audio and tools tucked behind one "More" tap. A new button in the header lets you reorder or hide any card — tap it, make the Console yours. Auto-drop the pad — for playing with a real controller: turn it on and, while a Steam game is running, your phone stops presenting a controller so it can't take player one from your gamepad. The full pad comes back the moment the game exits. "Did you know" tips — occasional one-line hints introduce features you might have missed, right where they live. One at a time, at most once a day, never naggy — and you can turn them off with the onboarding tour. Plus polish and reliability fixes throughout.

New Combos panel — hold the KEYBOARD button on the Pad to open one-tap key combinations: copy, paste, undo and more for the desktop, plus Kodi and media shortcuts (play/pause, context menu, info, back). Turn it on in Setup. See the volume change on your phone the moment you adjust it from Couchside — a quick on-screen readout so you don't have to look at the TV. Have an unlock code? The purchase screen now points you to redeem it in the App Store. New Portal light theme — a flickering orange-and-blue split down your RGB strip. On the Watch screen, Select and Back now work even when the box's window isn't in front, so the pad keeps driving after you switch away and back. If you tinker with OpenPuck receivers, there's a new shortcut to open its configurator right on the TV and drive it with the remote. Plus a snappier connection and reliability fixes throughout.

Experimental: drive your streaming apps from the couch. Turn on Watch in Setup to open Netflix, YouTube, Max and more on your box — then swipe the pad to move between tiles, tap to select, and skip forward or back without reaching for a mouse. Open any web page on the TV too, and zoom it for the couch. It's early and opt-in, so expect a few rough edges. Plus a faster feel when a service is starting, and reliability fixes throughout.

Encryption now turns on by itself. Once your box has the latest update, the app detects its encrypted connection and locks onto it automatically — the green lock appears on your boxes with no re-pairing needed. Plus reliability fixes and polish.

A much faster remote screen in Game Mode: in Steam Big Picture, the remote viewer no longer hangs for several seconds before the first picture — it shows the live preview right away, in about a second. Desktop sessions still stream smooth video. Added TLS encryption with certificate pinning for the connection to your box, so a box that enables it keeps your traffic and access token off your network. A lock badge shows when it's on. Plus reliability fixes and polish.

Light up your box. If it has an addressable RGB strip — like a Steam Machine's — you can now drive the whole strip from your phone: a real "night rider" sweep, rainbow, breathe, or a solid colour. Effects run on the box, so they keep going with the app closed and come back after a reboot. Paint each LED its own colour and save the pattern, name your presets to recall them with a tap, and set colour and brightness with smooth sliders. Whole-system RGB via OpenRGB when it's installed — control your motherboard, RAM and strips too. Plus fixes and polish.

Remote desktop, now fluid. See and control your box's whole desktop from your phone, with smooth hardware-accelerated H.264 video. Move the cursor with a trackpad or just tap where you want to click, type with a full keyboard, and flip to a full-screen landscape mode. Navigate Steam's Big Picture from the couch — point and tap your way through Game Mode menus. Switch the box's audio output from your phone: speakers, headphones, or HDMI, without getting up. Set the colour of your box's front light bar right in the app. Also new: a quick note scratchpad on the controller. Plus fixes and polish.

Flash an OpenPuck receiver from the couch: turn a cheap nRF52840 board into a Steam Controller 2 wireless dongle, right from your phone. Your whole library, instantly — browse games you own but haven't installed, and install them on the box from the couch. Game ratings on your library: Metacritic, Steam reviews, and Steam Deck/Proton compatibility, plus Open in Steam. New Playlog: queue and reorder the games you want to play next.

Fixes the big one: switching your box between Game Mode and Desktop no longer freezes the app. The trackpad would stop moving the cursor while everything still looked connected, and the only way back was force-quitting or switching boxes. That's fixed — switch as often as you like. New: a Big Picture button for PCs that have Steam but no Game Mode session (Nobara, most desktop Linux). One tap opens Steam Big Picture on the TV; long-press the same button to come back to the desktop. Also: connection diagnostics are reachable in large-pad mode, and tap-to-retry does a deeper reset when a connection goes quiet.

Fixes a bug where the app could stop responding — trackpad and buttons frozen — within a minute of opening, then quietly restart itself. It was a purchase-verification loop, most likely on iOS beta versions, and it could also drain battery. Restoring purchases is more reliable now. Also new: the Console shows every GPU in your box — dual-GPU machines show both cards, each with its own temperature, usage and memory.

New in 2.9.31 • Setting up your first box is now guided — the Setup tab walks you through installing the service, then finds every box on your network on its own and puts a PIN on your TV. No typing addresses, no hunting for a token. • See what your box is sending the TV — a new Display / Audio panel on Console shows live resolution and refresh rate, whether HDR and variable refresh are really on, your monitor's name, and which speaker is playing. • Redeemed a promo code? Restore Purchases now finds it. Codes redeemed in the App Store weren't being picked up, so the app could still say your trial had expired. • Easier to read — the small text throughout the app has been darkened for contrast, and error messages that were nearly invisible in light mode are now legible. • Your box's name no longer gets cut short in the header on smaller phones. • Updating box software no longer hangs on "Updating…" when an app can't be updated, and an OS update queued behind it now runs. • iPhone: the Paste button no longer hides behind the keyboard. • Optional new add-on: the Couchside Player puts Netflix, YouTube, Max and more on the TV, driven from your phone. It's early — install it from your box if you want to try it.

New in 2.9.30 • Scan to pair — point your phone's camera at the code on your box's screen, right inside the app. Setup → Scan a pairing code. No browser detour, no typing. • Choose how your box starts up — a new Boots into card on the Actions tab: Game Mode, Desktop, or whichever you used last. The switches below it only change what's on screen now; this is the setting that decides power-on. • Launch Netflix, Hulu and the rest — non-Steam shortcuts on your box now appear in Launch, so the phone can start them. • One flick, one step — swiping the remote past a short menu no longer sails through it. • TV mode is off by default now, and labelled the rough beta it is. Turn it on in Settings if you want it.

New in 2.9.29 • Skip 10 or 30 seconds — new arrows on Now Playing jump back or forward 10 seconds; hold one for 30. Change either amount in Settings, or switch the hold off. • Kinder to your battery — the Pad no longer holds your screen on indefinitely. Let it sleep after 5, 10, 30 or 60 idle minutes, or keep it always on. • Vitals first — the file-sending card moved to the bottom of the Console tab.

New in 2.9.23 • Bigger trackpad — a one-tap corner button expands the Mouse and Swipe surfaces for easier scrolling. • Steadier connection — if the app was backgrounded and the pointer stopped responding, it now reconnects on its own instead of a force-quit. • Honest status — the connection dot turns amber the moment input stops getting through; tap to reconnect. • Reliable right-click — two-finger tap registers every time; two-finger scrolling no longer fires stray clicks.

New in 2.9.22 • Update your box from your phone — Flatpak apps and the OS (SteamOS/Bazzite), together or one at a time. Turn it on once at the box. • A fresh install now walks you through pairing on the box's own screen. • Search your Preferences by typing. • Check for an app update in Setup › Account — it asks your store directly, sends nothing about you. • Closing the running game from your phone now actually works. • Swipe traces draw a clean glowing line.

Cover art finally works on Android — it never has, and every game showed a plain card instead of its poster. Find things faster: search your games on the Launch tab, and a new Steam search button opens search on the box and brings up your keyboard so you can type instead of picking letters with a d-pad. Close the running game from your phone. The Gaming card shows what's playing, how long it's been on, and a button to quit it. Better readings from your box: storage now reports how full drives really are and includes game drives like SD cards, handhelds show battery draw and time until full, and the GPU no longer looks like it has half a gigabyte. Watch what your box is doing while it updates, on your phone and on the box's own screen.

New in 2.9.17 • Touch animations. Preferences can now draw a ring wherever you tap, and a trail of dots while a finger moves, so a screen recording or a support screen-share shows what was actually pressed. Both are off by default. • Clearer wording on the unlock screen.