Yes. You can. And once you’ve tried it, you’ll wonder why you ever carried a separate device.

Where This Question Actually Comes From

I’ve been organising developer meetups for years. Before every event, the same question would come up — someone would lean over and ask: “Do you have a clicker?”

Sometimes we had one. Sometimes the presenter from last month still had it. Sometimes the batteries were dead. Sometimes it was there, but the USB receiver was missing. And sometimes it worked fine — until the Bluetooth started competing with every other wireless device in the room and the signal became unreliable.

We all had iPhones in our pockets. We were presenting on Macs. And yet we kept searching for a small plastic remote.

That’s what made me build Clicker.

The Biggest Misconception

People are so conditioned to think of a clicker as a physical object — a little remote you hold — that it simply doesn’t occur to them that their phone could do the same thing.

And that’s the whole misconception. Not that phones can’t do it. Just that people haven’t stopped to consider that they already can.

Your iPhone is the most capable device you carry. You use it for flights, payments, contracts, medical records, and business calls. The idea that it would be less useful for advancing slides than a $40 piece of plastic with two buttons is, when you think about it, a little strange.

What’s Actually Wrong With Hardware Clickers

The problems with dedicated remotes aren’t dramatic — they’re death by a thousand small frustrations:

  • The one from last time is with someone else
  • The USB receiver doesn’t fit your laptop’s ports
  • The batteries are flat
  • You borrowed one, but it’s laid out differently than yours
  • Bluetooth congestion in a room full of wireless devices

None of these are catastrophic. But they all happen at exactly the wrong moment — right before you go on stage.

A fair question at this point: if Bluetooth is the problem, doesn’t your phone have the same issue?

Not quite. Hardware clickers rely on cheap USB Bluetooth dongles — generic receivers that broadcast on the shared 2.4GHz band and compete with every other wireless device in the room. They have no way to distinguish themselves from the next clicker doing the same thing.

Clicker works differently. It establishes a direct, authenticated connection between your specific iPhone and your specific Mac. The QR code scan isn’t just for convenience — it’s how the two devices identify each other and form a dedicated connection. There’s no dongle in the middle, no shared receiver, and no competition with the clicker in someone else’s hand. When you’re connected, you’re connected to your Mac and nothing else.

Your phone doesn’t have any of those problems. You charge it every night. It’s always in your pocket. And it’s your phone — the layout never changes, the feel never changes, it’s never different from the last time you used it.

How It Actually Works

With Clicker, setup takes about ten seconds.

Open the Clicker app on your Mac — it sits in your Finder bar, always ready. Open Clicker on your iPhone, tap Connect, and point your camera at the QR code on your Mac. You’re connected instantly over a direct Bluetooth connection. No Wi-Fi needed, no accounts, no cloud — your devices talk to each other directly.

Choose whether you want to control Keynote or PowerPoint. Then open your presentation and start. Swipe forward, swipe back — your slides follow.

That’s the whole setup.

What Actually Changes

Here’s what people underestimate until they’ve done it: the freedom.

When you’re holding a physical clicker, you still tend to drift back toward your laptop. Old habit. But when the remote is your phone — something you’re completely comfortable with — something shifts. You face the audience more naturally. You move around the stage. The pedestal loses its pull.

A good presentation clicker isn’t just about changing slides. It’s about presenter confidence. Knowing that the remote in your hand just works, that you don’t need to glance at the laptop, that you can be anywhere in the room — that’s what changes how you present.

Is It Less Professional?

I’ve heard this concern. The idea that using a phone to present somehow looks less serious than using a dedicated remote.

My honest response: explain to me why.

This is the same phone you use to board a plane, sign contracts, run your business, and take calls from clients. In every one of those contexts, it’s entirely professional. Why would advancing slides be any different?

Nobody in the audience cares what’s in your hand. They care whether you’re confident, prepared, and worth listening to.

Who Benefits Most

The honest answer is: anyone who presents more than occasionally.

But it matters especially for people who travel, because it’s one less thing to pack and one less thing to forget. It matters for frequent presenters, because borrowing an unfamiliar remote every time is genuinely stressful. It matters for people who present in different venues, because you can’t always count on the hardware being there or working.

And it matters for occasional presenters too — because the setup is simple enough that there’s no learning curve.

The Short Version

If you’ve ever stood somewhere waiting for a presentation to start and heard the words “Does anyone have a clicker?” — you already know the problem.

The answer is already in your pocket. It’s been there the whole time.

Get Clicker on the App Store →

Questions? Find us on Bluesky or drop us an email.