iOS 17.0 Apple Remote on iPhone no longer works

What I did to fix a similar problem was: go to the Home app, make sure that the Apple TV you want to control is playing some type of media, select the remote icon (should be to the left of the rewind button), it should take you to the Apple TV Remote "app" from there.

I have 5 apple TV's and had this issue where only a wired Apple TV would show the remote on my phone. Previously had visibility to all 5 in remote app with no issue.

I have a Unifi Dream machine and wired access points. I had previously turned on "multicasting" to improve playing across numerous HomePods and apple TV's. I turned this off, restarted the router and voila, I can see all 5 remotes on my phone. Not sure if it has impacted playing across the house but at least fixed the issue at hand here!

There’s lots of discussions about the ATV Remote on IPhone and ATV and messages of them being on a different network.

i have my ATV, XBox and TiVo box along with other devices iMac and MacMini M2 Pro are all on the Ethernet part of my network. There is a WiFi SSID on the ASUS router which my iPhone, iPad etc all connect to. The IP addresses are all on the same network range.

surely they are all on the same network? I can even access the printer upstairs which is on the Ethernet network

So why don’t they work

Looks like also function that apple tv is working as home hub is crippled. It shows not responding in the home app. Only when ethernet cable is disconnected and connected via wifi, it works with remote app on iphone and shows available in home app. Very disappointing that this looks like not good tested by apple with ethernet connection.

Same here, Apple TV remote app on my iPhone no longer works, was totally fine for a long time. Are we now required to disconnect the Apple TV from a hardwired network switching to Wi-Fi to get this to work? There have been zero network changes and afaik nothing is wrong with my setup. Happens across a lot of systems actually (we are custom audio video integrators). Apple TV remote app shows available in AppleTV's in top drop down menu but when selected constantly spins and says something along the lines of "cannot connect".

An update about the issue. I was able to solve it. In my case it was not the IOS which gives the problem, but the managed switch i'm using. I have tested with connecting the apple tv directly to the router and it has worked. I was then going through the settings on the switch and found the problematic setting. In my case on a D-Link Switch it was the active DOS Protection for Blat, which blocked mdns(bonjour) messages to be sent. I have disabled that protection on the switch and so far it is working like it should. The remote app on the iphone and applet tv as home hub. That is info about Blat. (Blat Attack: This type of attack will send packets with the TCP/UDP source port equal to the destination port of the target device. It may cause the target device to respond to itself.)

Did you need to do that only once? Or every time going forward? My iPhone and Apple TV used to work easily and perfectly but for the past few years 9/10 times I try, the remote app sees the ATV by name, but just wont connect. Occasionally it works, but usually it does not 🤷

I also had this issue. Zero change to my network environment, IOS Apple TV remote for my 5 ATVs worked flawlessly for years, then after the OS17 upgrade to phone and ATVs, the ATVs disappeared from the Remote App and from Control Center.

Apple must be doing something goofy with multicast traffic. I could reboot my phone or ATVs to get them to temporarily show up in Remote app, but the ATVs would disappear after 30-45 minutes.

I've now had them working for about a week without issue. All I did was reboot my firewall and Wifi access point (I've got them separated). If you haven't tried rebooting your Wifi, go for that. Fixed it for me.

For me and all my devices, this was an iOS17 problem. After updating the Apple TV’s the remote app function on my iOS17 iPhone works again.

However, I would just like to say that this kind of thoughtless upgrade sequence is the same thing that happened to iTunes (which is barely a usable program anymore and has libraries of complaints about how much Apple doesn’t care about iTunes anymore, especially from PC’s, even though most people have their entire libraries saved to hard drives linked through iTunes). So maybe this is a hint that Apple is losing interest in the Apple TV product? It seems like what they do is start purposely doing “stuff” during software updates that becomes so inconvenient that customers just give up on it and slowly disappear to clear the way for them to make it disappear. I mean, that has been the Apple “way” for the last 10 years.

Wow thanks all. What a pain to get it working again! Updating my phone to iOS 17 as I type, AppleTV already is, hope that's the simple fix. Fyi they also changed the way to OK button behaves, have had to reprogram all our universal remote control systems (we are a custom integration firm). Unbelievable how they straight up totally disregard users with these updates. I certainly hope this is not their way of phasing out users as you suggest 55reasons, outside of these update blunders we do enjoy the AppleTV.

Problem came back.

more data: iPad on 17.0 can see all Apple TVs for Remote app, all the time.

all iPhones on 17.1 or greater cannot see majority of the Apple TVs in the remote app / control center.

this is so frustrating as we primarily control the TVs with our phones.

Same issue.

Works intermittently (rarely) on the wire, instantly works on wifi.

But i bought the ethernet version for a reason.

Did a packet capture, seems like it’s not even trying to establish a connection, like iOS cant see it or something.

Wouldn't be as much of an issue if the now manual profile switching didnt break the hdmi-cec volume control, requiring a restart.

This shiny pancake is almost unusable :( someone help

Had exactly the same problem when I decided to switch my WiFi router to modem only and use a new ASUS router. They had happily been working together different WiFi ssids. The modem/router ( Virgin Media ) also fed a 4 port Ethernet switch which fed the TIVO box, XBox and my ATV. It also connected to a home wiring connection so that I could feed my Apple tech in my office upstairs.

Maybe I’m stuck in the past but I prefer cable to WiFi it’s slightly faster and better for access large images from storage.

the switch was the start of couple of days of frustration. However in the end I had to do a factory reset on the Virgin Router and basically switch to WiFi.

My phone can control the ATV. I’ve not had too much of an issue with speed over WiFi I can get a good UHD 4k signal for the ATV and also I haven’t noticed a slowing of the loading but I haven’t been playing with big raw image files.

I am going to do some research to workout how WiFi speed compares to Ethernet speeds and possibly switch back to Ethernet

I've got 1/2 dozen AppleTVs, so this is frustrating. I did a factory reset on one of them, set everything back up, and it's stayed available in the iOS Remote App for about a day now, while all the others are not present. It's most annoying for me since I do home automations using the Airplay, Companion, RAOP protocols, so it's a chore to go generate credentials for all the things. Going to wait a week to see if this is stable before factory resetting the rest of the Apple TVs.

An update about my case: I moved my ATV to an other apartmant and since that everithing is working as it should be. Nothing changed in iOS and TV os side. Both have version 17. The settings are the same. The only differencies: in the first apatrmant ( the remote control does'nt work) I connected the ATV ethernet cable directly to the router ( an old DSL router) in the second apatmant (everithing is working) I connected the ATV ethernet cable to a switch in the network with a synology router.