How to use your iPhone as a keyboard for your Mac or PC

Mobile Mouse Remote is a great app that turns your iOS device into a powerful utilitarian accessory for your Mac or PC. So far, we’ve shown you how the app can be used as a mouse or trackpad for your computer and how you can use the app as a remote control for your computer, but it also has a lot of keyboard functionality built into it to make your device into a software-based keyboard for your computer.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how you can use Mobile Mouse Remote to type or perform keyboard commands on your Mac or PC directly from your iPhone or iPad.

iPhone and MacBook kept on a table

Using your iPhone or iPad as a keyboard for your computer

Using your iOS device as a keyboard for your Mac or PC can be super handy. A few of the scenarios I can think of right off the bat are:

  • When presenting on a larger screen or projector
  • When watching videos from your computer via your TV
  • When you want a separate numeric keypad
  • When your hardware keyboard isn’t working

Apart from these scenarios, I think you’ll find that Mobile Mouse Remote, which conveniently includes this functionality built right into it along with everything else we mentioned earlier, will come in handy for a number of other things too.

As you can see from the image above, Mobile Mouse Remote has more than just a basic QWERTY keyboard. It also includes a built-in number pad and a keyboard made specifically for function keys and directional keys.

The keyboards are switched between with the buttons just above the U, I, O, and P keys. Using these switching keys, you can easily go from typing to carrying out a command on your Mac to numeric input. Moreover, the number pad even includes cut/copy/paste options, which will be super useful for a wide variety of situations too.

The QWERTY keyboard

Mobile Mouse Remote’s integrated QWERTY keyboard comes with all of the same keys that you’d expect from the iOS keyboard, but it includes some Mac keys that your iOS keyboard doesn’t have; these include Command and Control, among others.

iOS Keyboard

The function keyboard

Mobile Mouse Remote’s function keyboard includes your F1 through to the F12 keys, as well as keys for Escape, Delete, Home, and End. The four multi-directional arrow keys and up and down scroll keys are included for your convenience, as are the numbers 1 through 4 at the top.

Like with the QWERTY keyboard, you also still get access to the Control and Command keys, as well as a Shift key. These come in handy when you’re performing keyboard commands.

The numeric keypad

Mobile Mouse Remote’s numeric keypad is a useful piece of software that lets you have the numeric keypad on your Mac. This is a feature that Apple has phased out of the mobile computer industry and only offers on their desktop computers, but now with this app, you can have the comfort of a numeric keypad even on your MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro.

It includes useful shortcuts to copying, cutting, and pasting text, as well as saving files and creating new files in supported apps.

Using Mobile Mouse Remote

Mobile Mouse Pro app icon

Mobile Mouse Remote utilizes your home Wi-Fi connection to connect your iOS device to your computer, but with an in-app purchase, you can connect over various other connection mediums instead, such as Bluetooth, Peer-to-Peer, and USB connection.

In any case, you’ll have to download the Mobile Mouse Server app on your Mac or PC to use your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad with your computer. It’s a free download, but keep in mind that the Mobile Mouse Remote app itself, which can be had from the App Store, is a $3.99 download, and in-app purchases do cost extra. There is also a lite, free version of the app with limited features.

We covered how to pair the two in our post about using your iPhone as a mouse or trackpad with your Mac or PC, so you can refer there for how to get started with this app combo.

Wrapping up

Using your iOS device as a keyboard for your Mac or PC has never been easier. There are tons of keyboard apps to choose from in the App Store, but the $1.99 Mobile Mouse Remote app has a great App Store rating from many happy users, and it should be obvious from all the features we’ve just shown you why that is.

What would you use your iPhone as a keyboard for your computer for? Share in the comments!

Check out next: