Smartphone/tablet remotes

can be controlled in several different ways, including both a physical remote control as well as using your smartphone or tablet. This page will link to both the official Team Kodi remote control apps and additional remote apps made by the community, as well as tell you how to enable smartphone/tablet app control in Kodi.

Quick set up guide
Turn on the following settings in to enable using a smartphone or tablet remote:

Settings → Services → Remote control → Allow programs on other systems to control Kodi → ON
 * This setting enables the basic ability to remotely control Kodi.

Settings → Services → Webserver → Allow control of Kodi via HTTP → ON
 * Many smartphone remotes also display additional library data, such as images and summaries. This setting allows that extra data to be transmitted to your remote app.
 * Take note of the Port number, the Username and the Password (if any). You'll probably need to enter these in your remote app.

Settings → Services → Zeroconf → Announce these services to other systems via Zeroconf → ON
 * This should be enabled by default already. Zeroconf makes it easier to find your Kodi install on your local network without having to know the exact IP address.

Manually enabling remote control
If you have installed on a device and it has started up in Kodi, and you either have SSH access or other access to the Kodi userdata folder, you can manually enable remote control. This is helpful in a few situations, for example: If you have a networked device but no physical remote control (left it at home, can't find the dang remote, etc), you can still use your phone to control Kodi.

There are two basic ways to do this:

guisettings.xml -
 * Normally you do not want to manually edit the guisettings.xml file. In this case it should be "safe", but only change these settings from  to , and don't edit other things.
 * Edit the guisettings.xml file in the userdata folder and look for the following settings under " ", and make sure they are set to "true". You'll have to look for them a little bit, because there among several other settings. Assuming you have not set a password or changed other default settings, this should work:
 * - true
 * - true
 * - true
 * Save the file and restart Kodi.

advancedsettings.xml -
 * While using an advancedsettings.xml file might be easier to enable these services, doing so will hide them from the normal Kodi GUI. You will have to remove or edit the advancedsettings.xml file to turn these settings back off, which can be confusing later on if you forgot you have an advancedsettings.xml file.
 * Create a plain text file (no rich text formatting, don't use .doc, etc) and save it as advancedsettings.xml. Make sure that the file extension is ".xml" and not ".txt" or ".xml.txt".
 * Cut and paste this into your new plain text file:
 * Save this file in your userdata folder
 * Restart Kodi.
 * Restart Kodi.
 * Restart Kodi.