My Remote 3 Experience Thus Far -- and a few questions/requests

General
1

(I posted this on Kickstarter as well, but thought it would be worth sharing here, along with a few direct questions and suggestions)

I received my remote and dock last week and have spent some time with it this weekend. Here are my impressions, which are generally quite positive.

First, the packaging is gorgeous. I know many won’t care about this, but if you’re selling a premium product, expectations will be high, with direct comparisons to high end brands like Apple and Bose. Kudos to Unfolded Circle for nailing the packaging and unboxing.

Build quality is similarly impressive. Remote 3 is far and away the most premium feeling remote I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve tried many over the years. It is beautiful, with a simple and striking rectangular shape, and in the hand it feels sturdy and quite heavy for its size.

The first run experience was bumpy. Remote 3 was able to join my Wi-Fi, but has had intermittent issues maintaining a signal. I have a mesh network from Eero that I have put significant investment into, and I’m not willing to switch away from it, as it’s been amazing. That said, after a few more attempts disconnecting and reconnecting, things have stabilized.

The next step was adding the dock. I was unable to get the dock to work wirelessly. It was incredibly unreliable and just plain refused to work. Thankfully my home theater has a switch with available ports, and after plugging it into Ethernet things have been very smooth with no more random disconnects. Unless you have a dedicated 2.4 Ghz Wi-Fi network, you really should hardwire it.

Software has probably been the most frustrating aspect thus far. There are very few out of the box integrations and supported devices. The ones that are there are a mixed bag:

- Home Assistant is probably the most important integration, and I had a lot of issues at first. I discovered that there is a third party integration for Home Assistant and using that solved most of my issues.

- The Apple TV integration would not work for me using the web configuration portal. It would request two codes from the Apple TV, and I would enter them, but then I would get an error message saying it failed and that I should try again. I tried a few dozen times before finally giving up. Later I realized that you could also set up integrations directly on Remote 3. When I tapped on the option to set up the Apple TV integration, I was greeted by instructions in German. I have the remote configuration correct for language, so no idea what was happening there. The good news is that the integration was activated successfully.

- The features of the remote are clearly quite powerful, but they’re also complex to understand, and the documentation is sorely lacking. After I finally got the hang of all the features I factory reset the remote and set it up again with the lessons I learned in mind. Much smoother the second go around.

- There are a lot of limitations that seem odd to me. For example, I set up an “activity” for the family to use with the Apple TV, and gave them controls over the room lighting. But the activity settings for the touch screen don’t allow for things like adding a light entity that you can tap on to control brightness and color. Instead you only get the ability to add buttons that do one and only one specific thing, such as setting brightness to a specific percentage.

- The media player widget is super buggy, often showing stale information, or mixing the title from the current playing item with the artwork of an older item.

- I would love to be able to push information from Home Assistant to Remote 3 for display, but there isn’t a way to do that. You can make some changes from the third party integration, but again it’s pretty limited.

All that being said, once I learned the quirks, figured out how to work around bugs, and spent some more time with it, I’ve been able to get my Remote 3 to a decent spot that is working smoothly. The family will be the ultimate judge, but I’m optimistic.

In summary, Remote 3 is a very well designed and built product that feels truly premium. The software is absolutely a work in progress, more like a beta release than a stable one. But, software can be improved over time, and it’s clear that there is a very solid foundation in place. I’m looking forward to seeing what UC can do once they are through the crazy pressure of a wildly successful Kickstarter with plenty of orders still to ship. Thank you to the entire UC team!

Now, some specific questions and suggestions:

  1. QUESTION: Are haptics and sounds supposed to be working at this stage? My Remote 3 doesn’t seem to provide either, in spite of the settings indicating that it should. I am assuming that its a firmware thing, but I suppose I could have received a faulty unit.
  2. QUESTION: When using the slider, the display shows that my Apple TV is changing volume, but nothing actually happens. Is this a known issue? I also am not clear if its possible to change the slider’s behavior. All other buttons and screens have some level of customization, but I don’t see anything in the UI on-device or via the web related to the slider.
  3. SUGGESTION: Currently, activity pages are quite limited, only allowing for icon buttons, text buttons, and media widgets. I would love to be able to add entity widgets as well, for controlling lights, fans, and other Home Assistant entities. We can do this on the main “page” views, but not on activities.

I am sure I’ll have more questions and feedback over time, but wanted to get this first batch out into the world.

2

This is problem from the Apple TV that not all apps providing complete playback metadata and the integration not clearing all media attributes when switching apps or stoping playback. To be fair Android TV is much worse as you get almost nothing in comparison to the Apple TV.

The only sound effect at the moment is when putting the Remote into the charger and it starts charging. Pressing items on the screen gives a very suptile haptic feedback.

Can you change the volume if you use the regular volume up/down commands? Additional mapping functions for the slider are planned according to UC.

If you add additional entities e.g. lights to your activities you can access them by tapping on the top bar in your activity. This opens the same entity ui as when opening them from the main pages.

Another tip if you encounter errors you don’t understand inspect the logs under Settings/Development/Logs and choose the service you have problems with. Most integrations offer more infos in their logs as they can only send very generic error codes to the remote core.

3

I wouldn’t call it a problem from AppleTV. Every app provides its own metadata and controls. The apple-designed apps are pretty good at providing all the data. Some aftermarket apps like plex and infuse are pretty good too. Youtube for example doesn’t provide artwork, just name and controls. The media player widget has a problem too - it’s on it to clean up the thumbnail from the old playback when a new one starts and no image is provided - but it doesn’t - it makes the last image sticky until a new one is provided.

4

That’s what I wrote. The tvOS apps are causing this not the media widget itself. The integration is causing the old artwork. It’s the task of the integration to clear old artwork as the next app may not expose artwork.

5

Yeah, I noticed similar when I was developing a little ESP32 control panel for my home theater. Sometimes you get artwork, sometimes you don’t. Same with media details in general. That said, I was able to work around the issue using some heuristics. Notably, when the active app changes, I wipe all state. I agree that this is sort of janky and that many apps don’t provide media art. In the event that there is no media art available, it would be far better to show a default image rather than just a sea of black that looks like the remote isn’t working.

Welp, sounds like my Remote 3 is faulty. I have already factory reset it once, which didn’t fix the problem. I will have to reach out to Unfolded Circle, but I’ll happily wait to get a replacement so that other Kickstarter backers don’t have to wait longer.

Yes I can change the volume with the up/down buttons. The Apple TV itself is able to change volume with the volume buttons so I am not sure what’s going on.

Yeah, I noticed this, its just inconvenient, and its also cluttered with a bunch of entities that are helpers from Home Assistant that I don’t want to see.

Thanks for the thoughtful and informative reply :slight_smile:

6

On the UC or the Apple TV remote? I meant the UC remote. Do you have more than one media player or widget added to your activity? I think this could be the cause of this issue. Some users have reported that the order of the media player entity in the included entities list is important for which media player is used for the slider.

7

On both the Apple TV remote and my Remote 3 using its volume buttons. If I map the volume buttons to the Apple TV using the integration on Remote 3, they control the volume properly. The same is true if I map the buttons to my AVR via the Home Assistant integration. In both cases, swiping on the slider displays a volume bar moving up and down on the screen, but the actual volume doesn’t change.

8

Then check if you have other media player entries added in you activity that take over the slider volume control.

9

Good idea! I’ll take a look a bit later today.

10

The only media players in my “Streaming” activity are my AVR and the Apple TV. Either one should work to control volume with the slider, but neither does.

11

Can you post the core and user interface logs right after you used the slider? (Settings/Development/Logs and chosse both services from the dropdown)

12

Another good idea :slight_smile:

I’m gonna be tied up with work for the rest of the day, but should have some time to do some debugging in the evening.

13

I don’t believe the slider is using the same commands as the volume buttons. It probably uses a command to set volume at precise value instead of constantly sending volume up/down commands. The issue probably lies there. I haven’t seen that specific command for the AppleTV but I know it exists for AVRs as I’m using a volume value set command for my Denon AVR as part of the startup sequence. All that being said - the slider works for me when the only media player widget added in the activity is the AVR but it’s not smooth - it just sends values once or twice per second while using it. The slider doesn’t work when my AppleTV is the media player widget in the activity but that is expected as I’ve disabled CEC on everything.

14

I’m wondering if you’re not confusing media player(entity) with media player widget(that lives on the screen of the remote inside an activity). The slider seems to be tied to first media player widget you add to the specific activity screen.

15

This is how I have it configured: https://cleverdevil.io/s/Screenshot-2025-08-12-at-3.14.png

Its tied to the Apple TV entity. So, if your assumption is correct that the slider is tied to the media player widget, then it would be attempting to send specific volume values to the Apple TV, which as you said, it does not support. While I could just swap the media player widget over to my AVR (a Pioneer Elite via the Onkyo integration for Home Assistant), I would end up with an otherwise useless media player widget.

I know that there is a “Universal Media Player” plugin for Home Assistant that can construct media players from bits and pieces of other media players, merging attributes. If what you say is correct, then I should potentially be able to create a custom media player that combines the Apple TV media player with the AVR media player. I’ll give it a crack and let you know how it goes.

16

Sadly, I believe that is the case. If I swap my widget from AppleTV to AVR, the slider is able to control the volume but the AVR widget is useless as you said. Give it a try and let me know how it goes for you.

17

Quick update. I tried using the Universal Media Player integration to solve the issue, like so:

media_player:
  - platform: custom_universal_media_player
    name: "Apple TV Enhanced"
    unique_id: custom_media_player_atv_enhanced
    device_class: tv
    children:
      - media_player.home_theater_2 
      - media_player.home_theater_receiver
    commands:
      turn_on:
        action: media_player.turn_on
        target:
          entity_id: media_player.home_theater_receiver
      turn_off:
        action: media_player.turn_off
        target:
          entity_id: media_player.home_theater_receiver
      volume_up:
        action: media_player.volume_up
        target:
          entity_id: media_player.home_theater_receiver
      volume_down:
        action: media_player.volume_down
        target:
          entity_id: media_player.home_theater_receiver
      volume_mute:
        action: media_player.volume_mute
        target:
          entity_id: media_player.home_theater_receiver
      select_source:
        action: media_player.select_source
        target:
          entity_id: media_player.home_theater_receiver
      volume_set:
        action: media_player.volume_set
        target:
          entity_id: media_player.home_theater_receiver
    attributes:
      volume_level: media_player.home_theater_receiver|volume_level
      is_volume_muted: media_player.home_theater_receiver|is_volume_muted

It creates an entity on the Home Assistant side, which I can then select and push to the remote using the Unfolded Circle HASS integration (the third party one). When I add a media widget using this media player, everything looks the same (which is good), but the slider still doesn’t work (which is bad).

Honestly, I think this is just a bug on the UC side. Users shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to make basic volume control with the slider work. This isn’t a criticism, I know that its early in the lifecycle of this software. It’ll eventually work properly. In the meantime, I can live with just using the volume up and down buttons.