Losing a Samsung remote doesn’t mean losing the TV. Nearly every Samsung set has a physical button on the body, and once the TV is on there are several ways to control it from your phone. Here’s the full list, simplest first.
1. Press the TV’s own power button
This is the fastest fix, and the one people forget the TV has.
On most Samsung TVs there is one button, tucked under the front panel — look in the centre-bottom or the bottom-right corner, just behind the edge. Feel for it with a finger; it’s rarely visible from the front. A single press turns the TV on.
On many models that button is actually a small jog stick:
- Press to turn on, or to select.
- Push up / down to change the volume.
- Push left / right to change the channel or move through a menu.
- Press and hold to open a menu where you can switch the input (HDMI) and power off.
That’s enough to get to whatever you were watching without any remote at all.
2. Control it from your phone
Once the TV is on and connected to your Wi-Fi, your phone can act as the remote. Samsung’s own SmartThings app does this, and so does Zapp — which adds power, volume, the real input list, and one-tap access to the apps installed on the TV, with no subscription.
There’s a catch worth being honest about: a TV that is completely powered off and has never been paired can’t be woken by an app, because its network goes to sleep with it. That’s a hardware limit, not an app limit. But once a TV has been paired, Zapp can wake it from standby over Wi-Fi (Wake-on-LAN) — so the next time the remote goes missing, your phone alone is enough.
3. Turn it on from a connected device (HDMI-CEC)
If you have a device plugged into the TV over HDMI — a game console, a soundbar, an Apple TV, a Blu-ray player — powering that on will often switch the TV on with it and select its input automatically. This is a feature called HDMI-CEC, which Samsung calls Anynet+. It’s on by default on most sets.
4. Use a universal or replacement remote
A genuine Samsung replacement remote, or any decent universal remote, will pair with the TV. This is the right long-term fix if the original is gone for good — but it costs money and takes a few days to arrive, so it’s rarely the answer for right now.
What doesn’t work
An iPhone cannot control a TV over infrared — iPhones have no IR hardware, so any app claiming to be a “universal remote” for an old, non-network TV from an iPhone alone can’t deliver. Phone control only works over Wi-Fi, with a smart TV that’s on the network. (On Android it’s different — some Android phones do have an IR blaster.)
The short version
Reach under the front panel and press the power button — that’s almost always all it takes. Then, if you’d rather not hunt for that button every time, set your phone up as the remote while the TV is on, and it can even wake the TV next time.