Samsung already fixed TV typing, but app developers don’t care

As good as Samsung TVs are, one of their most frustrating failures is still something painfully basic: typing with the remote. It’s slow, clumsy, and needlessly tedious. Voice input exists, sure, but it’s unreliable at the best of times and even worse if English isn’t your first language.

I’ve been looking for a better solution ever since I bought my first Samsung TV. And the annoying part is that Samsung already has one. It just barely uses it.

That solution lives inside the SmartThings app. If you open the TV remote on your phone, you can type using your phone’s on-screen keyboard instead of pecking away with the physical remote. On paper, it’s exactly what Samsung TV users need.

The catch is that it only works when an app uses Samsung’s built-in virtual keyboard. Apps like Samsung Internet do. The moment you highlight the URL field and that TV keyboard pops up, your phone can take over and make typing feel normal again.

The issue is that most third-party TV apps don’t use Samsung’s keyboard at all. They rely on their own input methods, which completely ignore this feature. We tested plenty of major apps, and almost none of them support Samsung’s system keyboard.

Interestingly, the newly launched TV Jellyfin app does support this feature. It summons Samsung’s built-in virtual keyboard, which allows you to type on your phone through the SmartThings remote. But for any other app that doesn’t do this, the whole trick falls apart.

That’s a real shame. This is one of those rare TV/SmartThings features I’m convinced most users would love if it worked reliably every time. In reality, though, most Samsung TV owners probably don’t even know it exists.

If it worked consistently across apps, it could have turned the SmartThings mobile remote into a genuine upgrade over the physical one. The framework is clearly there. The execution just isn’t.

Samsung needs to push this feature harder, both to users and to app developers. Until then, one of the best ideas it’s had for its TVs risks remaining stuck in a weird state of limbo.