Elgato Stream Deck Mobile

I needed to be able to set up control for music and sound effects, for a stage play in a really short period of time, and give over to others to control, because I would be on stage. I sequenced the songs, as numbers, and sound effects, as letters, for easy and quick identification in low light, while following the script. At first, I had two people, needing to be able to trigger as needed. Problem… low budget, and only a Stream Deck with 15 buttons. Saw a 64 bit version, but the price was out of my range. Then I saw the IOS option, and changed the game! I got an iPad for $100 and installed the app, and gained over 160 new triggers, and you can have more than one running at the same time, so I was able to give both persons their own control boards, and everything worked perfectly!

This is absolutely a 5 star app for iPhone except for one thing. Maybe it’s an issue on my end, but lately, sometimes the app connects and sometimes it doesn’t. No changes between one session or another are made to cause a disconnect/reload but more often than not, when I push a button, the app reloads, takes a few seconds to trigger the action, or doesn’t work at all. Example: It will load the icons, but won’t have the assigned titles. When I push an icon, it either doesn’t work, or it shows the “connecting” message, and reloads all the icons. Sometimes it takes a solid minute (literally) to load everything. Sometimes it doesn’t even load them all. One fix is to close the PC program and the app and reload both but that shouldn’t need to be done. And it’s just not good when it happens mid stream. I like to time things out. And when I say blah blah blah see you next time, push the end scene button, and nothing happens, I have to play it off and manually switch scenes and all that. I’m a small steamer so it’s not a huge deal to me personally (for now) but I can’t look professional if my tools don’t work properly. I’d like to get a physical stream deck but I’m sceptical about it because if the app doesn’t work like it should, how do I know the actual stream deck will? $2 a month is one thing, but I don’t wanna drop $150 for a tool that works (or doesn’t) the same way. Absolutely a 5 star app when it works smoothly, but more often than not, it doesn’t.

Downloaded this app today to act as a second interface for our studio’s Streamdeck XL. There appears to be a major latency issue between firing a command and it actually showing up. Trying to fire off lower thirds but I can’t confidently use this app if the lower thirds can’t even pop off in a timely fashion. I expect there to be a small amount of latency, but nothing to this magnitude. It’s completely unusable with the inconsistency of the input delay it currently has. Obviously no input delay is our endgame when we are running live broadcasts. I’m currently using an iPhone 12 Pro Max and I encourage any other feedback if this appears to be an issue across all iDevices. I’m rating it 1 star for now simply because it is completely unusable in this state. I’m currently in the trial period and will give it the full stint. But if nothing fixes to make it reliable interface, I will not be using it and I will not recommend it to fellow streamers/technical directors. UPDATE: Decided to try and reinstall to see if any issues could be resolved that way. I am now locked out of the app due to the subscription model. My subscription is still active (albeit trial period) but it won’t allow me to sign-in through my Apple ID and access the main screen. Instead after inputing my information it brings me back to the subscription service. It appears the app developers are not being paid enough because this is a very simple application that shouldn’t suffer from small issues like this. I will attempt to make it work through the trial period but again if nothing improves…STAY FAR AWAY!!!!