What PController is and what it's for
You're at work and the file you need is on the PC at home. With PController you open it from your phone's browser in a couple of minutes. No router to touch, no VPN, no static IP.
That's PController: remote control of your PC from your phone. It sounds simple, but the interesting part is how it does it inside.
The problem it solves
Traditional remote-control tools usually fall down on one of these three things:
- They ask you to configure the router (port forwarding, static IP). On corporate or rented networks you often can't even do that. PController uses an outbound connection: zero network configuration.
- Their interface is designed for a mouse and keyboard, and on a phone it feels clumsy. PController's viewer is touch-first: you touch the screen and the PC responds.
- They cost $15-30/month for personal use. PController Pro costs $5.99/month, and if you only use it on your own network, the Local plan is $10 paid once.
The result: you control your PC from the sofa, the office or a trip, without fighting the router or paying corporate prices.
How it works inside
There are three main pieces:
Desktop server — the executable you install on your PC (a single .exe, written in Go). It captures the screen with the native Windows API (DXGI), compresses the frames to JPEG and sends them over a WebSocket. It also listens for control commands (mouse, keyboard, scroll) and runs them straight against the system.
Encrypted tunnel — when the server starts, it launches a tunnel process that opens an outbound connection to an edge network. That creates a unique subdomain (yourpc.pcontroller.app) reachable from the internet without opening any ports. The traffic is encrypted with TLS 1.3.
Viewer in the browser — from your phone you connect to your PC's subdomain, the viewer receives the JPEG frames and draws them on a canvas. Touches on the screen become mouse commands (normalised coordinates) and go out over the control WebSocket. There's nothing to install on the phone.
Why don't you open ports?
The tunnel uses an outbound connection from your PC to the edge network. Being outbound, it passes through the router's NAT without any configuration. It's the same technique services like ngrok or Tailscale use, on infrastructure that already handles millions of connections a day.
What data goes through the tunnel?
The screen frames (JPEG) and the control commands (mouse/keyboard events). The traffic is encrypted with TLS 1.3 between your phone, the tunnel edge and your PC. As with most modern web traffic, the edge terminates TLS in order to route. There is no extra end-to-end encryption layer. If that doesn't sit right with you, LAN mode goes through no external server at all.
If that raises privacy questions for you, read our security guide.
Which operating systems does it work on?
The desktop server runs on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit). On the phone side you only need a modern browser — Chrome, Safari or Firefox — so it works the same on Android and iOS.
Do I need to know how to program to use it?
No. You download the installer, run it (it asks for no administrator rights) and PController sits there like any other system-tray app. On the phone side you install nothing: you open the browser and that's it.
You've seen how it works inside. Now try it: 7 days with everything unlocked, no card. Afterwards you keep going with Local at $10 paid once, and you add Pro on top if you want the tunnel and audio.
Get started — free Try Pro for 7 days