Couchside vs Downburst

Couchside turns your iPhone into a dashboard, remote, game launcher and controller for your living-room Linux gaming PC: SteamOS, Bazzite, a docked Steam Deck, or another supported systemd Linux box. WHAT TO PLAY NEXT Find your next game with suggestions from your box’s game history. See what is running, choose another suggestion, and launch after confirming. The Play tab keeps recent content ready as you move between tabs. Optional demo mode lets you explore sample games away from your box. YOUR STEAM COMPANION Connect Steam on your box for profile and library stats, playtime trends, achievement progress, wishlist discounts and price-drop alerts. Add an optional IsThereAnyDeal integration for historical-low price comparisons. These opt-in features contact Steam and IsThereAnyDeal. Background wishlist notifications are best-effort and need your phone to reach the box. LIVE CONSOLE Check CPU temperature, load, memory, storage, uptime and service health. Supported handhelds also show battery and power information. See what is playing and manage multiple boxes from unified cards with live vitals and connection controls. When the TV is black, inspect the box from your phone. FIX IT FROM THE COUCH Read recent service logs, restart the display session, switch between Desktop and Game Mode, or reboot and shut down with confirmation. Available actions depend on your box’s capabilities and permissions. GAMES, STREAMING AND CONTROLS Browse installed games with cover art, search and filters. Launch a game on the TV or start Steam Remote Play from another PC. Use a virtual gamepad, swipe navigation, trackpad with two-finger gestures, or keyboard input. Landscape controls give you more room when you need it. TV AND LIGHTING Control power, volume and input on supported TVs, including compatible LG and Google TV models. Compatible HDMI-CEC hardware lets the box control the TV. On supported lighting hardware, adjust strip effects, reactive meters and artwork-inspired Game Aura presets. Create custom sequences with frame-by-frame timing and true on/off strobe effects. EASY PAIRING A welcome guide introduces Couchside and optional integrations. Install the free Couchside service on your box, then scan its QR code or enter its pairing PIN. Refined animations can be turned off in Preferences and respect Reduce Motion. Your phone and box must be on the same local network. WAKE FROM THE COUCH Wake supported Ethernet-connected boxes with progress and reconnection confirmation. On iPhone, waking may require another awake Couchside box on the same network to relay the request. Hardware, firmware and network settings must support Wake-on-LAN. PRIVATE LOCAL CONTROL Remote-control traffic stays on your local network, with no cloud relay or Couchside account. Pairing supports an encrypted, pinned connection. Optional online features, store purchases and update checks contact their respective services. No analytics. The Linux service is open source and the app is source-available. TRY FREE FOR 7 DAYS, PAY ONCE Download free and try the full app for 7 days. A one-time purchase unlocks continued use; there is no subscription. Existing unlocks carry forward. REQUIREMENTS • A supported Linux gaming box on your home network • The free Couchside service installed on that box • Your iPhone and box on the same LAN • Optional integrations and hardware for Steam account features, TV control and lighting

Downburst is a download manager for iPhone and iPad that shows you the weather. Paste a link and the file starts falling. The whole queue is one screen: current speed as rainfall, a live graph of the last 45 seconds, and every transfer with its own progress, ETA and stream count. You can tell at a glance whether things are going well. CLOUDBURST Big files arrive in up to four parallel streams instead of one. Downburst opens byte ranges, checks the server honours them, pulls the parts at the same time and stitches them back together on arrival. Servers that do not support ranges fall back to a single stream without fuss. RESUME THAT ACTUALLY RESUMES Pause anything and pick it up later, byte for byte. Lose Wi-Fi mid-transfer and the queue waits for connectivity rather than starting over. Failures back off and retry on their own at 5s, 15s, 45s, 2m and 4m, then stop bothering you. IT KEEPS GOING WHEN YOU LEAVE Downloads continue while the app is closed, because they run on the system background transfer service rather than a timer that dies with the app. A Live Activity counts down on your Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, a Home Screen widget shows the queue, and a notification tells you when a file lands. THE INLET Paste a whole wall of text and Downburst pulls every link out of it. Each one gets a pre-flight check before it joins the queue: the real filename, the real size, and whether it can be resumed. Untick the ones you did not mean to grab. ARCHIVES, UNPACKED ZIP and RAR extract themselves when they land, multi-part sets included. Password-protected archives ask once, and remembered passwords live in the device keychain so the next one opens without asking. WATCH IT HERE Tap a video and it plays: hold to speed up, double tap to skip, drag for brightness and volume, pinch to fill, rotate with one tap even with the rotation lock on, pull it down by its top edge and keep browsing while it plays in a bar above the tabs. Subtitles from sidecar files or inside the file, chapters, a sleep timer, an A to B loop, AirPlay, Picture in Picture and Lock Screen controls. MP4, MOV and M4V play natively; MKV, AVI, WebM, FLV, TS, OGG and Opus play through VideoLAN's own engine, and Chromecast goes through it too. It remembers where you stopped. EVERYTHING LANDS IN FILES Finished downloads go to On My iPhone, Downburst, Downloads, visible in the Files app, or to any folder you choose there, iCloud Drive included, where a file uploads only once it has fully landed. Sorting rules file them into folders by type or by name. Preview them in place, zoom through images, share them onward, or find them from the Home Screen with Spotlight. A checksum published beside a file is checked on arrival. YOURS TO TUNE Set how many downloads run at once and how many connections may hit any one server. Allow or block cellular, or mark one enormous download Wi-Fi only. Servers that ask for a login get one, kept in your device's keychain and sent only to them. Lock the app behind Face ID. AT HOME ON EVERY SCREEN Two columns on iPad. Hold, release and check the queue from Shortcuts and Siri, or from buttons on the widget. Every control has a name for VoiceOver, every size follows Dynamic Type, and the rain holds still for Reduce Motion. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO Downburst downloads files from direct links. It does not save media from streaming or social platforms, and those hosts are blocked in the app by design. There are no torrents and no plugins. Download only what you own or have the rights to save. FREE, AND STAYING FREE Every feature above is in the free app: no paid tiers, no trials, nothing held back. Settings has an optional tip jar, and it unlocks nothing. No account, no analytics, no adverts, no tracking. Nothing you download passes through a server of mine, because there is not one.