Reforo - Remote for Smart TV 4+

Basically whenever it’s late at night, my brother likes to have his volume on his TV tremendously loud and I don’t like that because I need to get my beauty rest because I’m not gonna be able to be the princess of Arrindale and her bags under my eyes, but the thing is, is that our bedrooms are not together so that means my phone would have to reach his TV AND IT DOES 😜 I would definitely recommend this app. If you are looking to scheme somebody to power off their TV with your phone or if you lost your remote or just don’t wanna buy one so mad respect to the creator of this app now I can turn off his TV and that brought me a lot of joy may have even cared my depression*sniff sniff*

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ fantastic app

The variety of shows you can see on the Roku channel is amazing. Something for everyone for sure! I love finding old TV shows to watch the series and episodes I missed, some cases whole series because I wasn’t in the country or something.
One small hitch are the commercials. But they’re short, not many of them, definitely not like on “real” TV and actually some them are quite interesting.
I gave Roku Channel four stars because of their search abilities. It could be a lot more precise. I search for something and get a whole bunch of things related and I can’t find what I was searching for to start with. I needed to find an episode about a 1959 plane that was destroyed by a bomb, the first in the US. I want my husband to watch it but I can’t find it; I don’t know what the name of the site it was on and I couldn’t find it with the all searching I did.

This isn’t an app affiliated with Roku, despite the dark pattern of making it look like it is. There’s some fine print letting the user know this, but lots of the highly-rated reviews are clearly rating Roku as a service and not this Roku remote from a random developer.

Aside from that it’s a bad app functionally. Constantly loses connection, settings aren’t persisted, etc.

The worse things are that it requests significantly more permissions than needed. Typically this level of permissions is only requested when not actually needed when the app is tracking you and selling the data to third parties. The similar and infamous Flashlight App that requested all permissions and just sold all your data to ad companies (or worse) is another example of what this “Roku Remote” app is certainly doing.

To complete the scam circle, this app includes unskippable, unexitable full screen ads. Not only is this pretty user hostile, but because there’s no way to exit most of the ads the user ends up clicking them accidentally (or exiting the app and reloading). This is ad fraud because the user never intended to click, yet the company gets paid for these clicks.

You can defang this app with network wide ad blocking, something like a PiHole, which will block the ads, and kill the trackers in other ways, but largely not worth it just for the limited functionality this app provides.