How to use your phone as a wireless controller for your PC

If you’ve ever picked up your phone, looked at your gaming PC across the room, and thought “there has to be a way to use this thing as a controller without buying another piece of plastic”… you’re right. There is. It’s free, and when it’s set up it feels exactly like a wired Xbox pad.

The trick is a pair of free apps: Satellite (runs on your gaming PC) and Dish (runs on your phone). They talk to each other over the Wi-Fi you already have, and your phone shows up to your games as a normal controller.

This is the five-minute guide.

What you’ll need

• A gaming PC running Windows 10/11
• A phone or tablet running Android 7.0 or newer
• Both devices on the same Wi-Fi network, ideally 5 GHz or 6 GHz

(Dish for Windows, macOS, and Linux are in active development for later releases. Today’s version is Dish on Android plus Satellite on Windows.)

Step 1: Install Dish on your phone

Grab Dish for Android from Google Play, or install it from GitHub Releases.

Step 2: Install Satellite for Windows on your PC

Download Satellite from the GitHub releases page and run it. When it’s done you’ll see a small dish icon in your system tray. That’s Satellite, sitting there waiting for a controller to talk to.

Step 3: Pair with a 4-digit PIN

Open Dish on your phone. Within a second or two your gaming PC pops up by name. Tap it, and Satellite shows you a 4-digit PIN. Type the PIN into Dish, tap “Pair,” and you’re connected.

This is a one-time step. Dish remembers your gaming PC after that, so next time you just open the app and play.

Step 4: Pick a layout

Dish comes with a handful of built-in layouts: a classic Xbox-style overlay, a fight-stick layout, and a “minimal” layout for retro and 2D games. You can tweak any of them. Long-press a button to drag it, resize it, or change what it does.

Tip: if you already have a real controller paired to your phone over Bluetooth (a DualSense, an 8BitDo, anything Android recognizes), Dish will use that instead. You don’t have to play on the touch overlay if you’d rather hold a physical pad.

Step 5: Press a button. Your game responds.

Done. Open any game on your PC that supports an Xbox controller, which is basically all of them, and you’re playing.

Why this beats Bluetooth

A few people ask why we didn’t just use Bluetooth. Three reasons you’ll actually feel:

1. Speed. Over Wi-Fi, Dish feels about as fast as a controller plugged in with a cable, and clearly snappier than a Bluetooth pad. In a fast game, that’s the difference between landing a move and missing it.
2. Multiple controllers. Bluetooth gets cranky once you connect more than a couple of pads to one PC. With Dish, four players in your living room is no harder than one.
3. Range. Bluetooth gives up after a wall or two. Dish reaches as far as your Wi-Fi does: another room, another floor.

Common questions

Do I need Sunshine and Moonlight? No. Dish and Satellite work on their own as a wireless gamepad. They also pair nicely with Sunshine and Moonlight if you want to stream the picture to your TV. See the naming page for that whole story.

Will my game see Dish as a real Xbox controller? Yes. Your phone shows up as a standard Xbox controller, and games can’t tell it apart from one plugged in with a cable.

Is this safe on a Wi-Fi I don’t fully trust? Yes. Your inputs are private to your devices. See the security page for the details.

Can I use multiple phones at once? Yes. Several phones can pair to the same PC, each one its own controller. Couch co-op is genuinely fun.

Where to next

If you got this far, you might also like:

• Connecting a controller to a PC from another room, the right way
• The full how-it-works walkthrough
• Why we named these things “Dish” and “Satellite”

If Dish made your setup better, tips keep this project going.