Somewhere over the course of the last few years of tvOS and iOS updates, compounded by upgrading iPhone every year or two, my wife’s iPhone lost the ability to use Remote.

When opening Remote, it would say “Searching…”, but would not connect to an Apple TV (we have two). Nowadays, with how integrated the Apple TV is within the ecosystem, there is not much you can do to troubleshoot an issue if it’s not working. I tried turning to Google-ing, but that doesn’t really help. You land in Apple Supoort forums which are nearly useless…. you find other folks who have come across some things where they’re similar but if the issue was fixed – it either doesn’t work for you or the original poster (OP) didn’t come back with the fix. We tried restarting Apple TV and iPhone, the issue even persisted to new network hardware (same Wi-Fi name, I’m not looking to reconnect every… single… device… if I don’t have to).

For us, in this particular case, doing a Reset and Update fixed the problem. To do this, go to Settings then System, then choose Reset. You’ll be prompted to Reset only or Reset and Update. I opted to do Reset and Update. Once I went through the setup process, we tested Remote on iPhone and it’s now working for both of us again.

Hooray!