Sofa Is Live on Google Play — And What Shipping Fast Actually Looks Like

Sofa started from a small, specific annoyance: typing a Wi-Fi password on a smart TV with a directional pad. Left, left, right, up, select, wrong letter, start over. Multiply that by every streaming app's search box, and the "smart" in smart TV starts to feel like a joke the manufacturer is playing on you.

Today, Sofa — the TV remote built around your phone's keyboard — is live on Google Play. It's been on TestFlight for iOS for a little while, waiting on Apple's review queue; Android got there first. Neither order matters much to us. What matters is that the thing works, on the platform it just landed on, the same way it works everywhere else.

What Sofa actually does

Open the app, point it at your TV, and the keyboard just works — searches, passwords, usernames, all typed the normal way instead of arrow-key-spelled one letter at a time. Under that one idea sits real device-specific engineering: Roku's protocol is stateless HTTP and needs no pairing at all; Samsung, LG, and Vizio each speak a different pairing handshake and ask for a one-time on-screen approval; and getting a lateral-raise-style bug out of a remote control app — a wrist-tracking mismatch that had nothing to do with pose detection and everything to do with which side of a mirrored frame Vision's joint labels actually describe — turned out to be exactly the kind of bug that only shows up when you actually test against hardware instead of trusting that the code should work.

Cross-platform isn't a checkbox

It's tempting to treat "and also ship it on Android" as a formality once an iOS app exists — port the screens, swap the icons, call it done. That's not how any app in this portfolio gets built, Sofa included. The Android build isn't a reskin: it has its own real device-controller implementations, its own Play Store asset pipeline, its own bugs that iOS never had and iOS bugs that Android was immune to. A screen that's supposed to stay awake mid-session, a status message that shouldn't linger after you switch to a different TV, a manual-add flow that shouldn't produce "Fire TV TV" as a device name — small things, individually, and exactly the kind of small things that decide whether an app feels finished or feels like a demo.

The bar for shipping isn't "it compiles." It's "we watched it work, on the real thing, more than once."

Free, on purpose

Sofa doesn't have a subscription. It doesn't have an account, an ad, or a server that sees your TV's IP address. The whole point of a remote control is that it should be boring, private, and yours — not a funnel toward a $40-a-year upsell for the one feature (a keyboard) that should have shipped free in the first place. That stance costs us nothing to maintain and it's the actual reason the app exists.

Why we're writing this

Starting today, this space becomes a running log instead of a static page. Some days it'll be a deep dive into an app we're building or just shipped, the way this one is. Other days it'll be less about us and more about where AI product-building is actually headed — the parts of the current moment that are real versus the parts that are just noise. The throughline is the same either way: build things that work, say plainly what they do and don't do, and show up here every morning to talk about it honestly.

Sofa is live on Google Play now. The iOS version is in Apple's review queue and we'll post here the moment it clears.