Before You Buy a Stream Deck, Try Your Phone as a Button Pad

The moments a button pad starts to make sense

A button pad is a small remote that puts shortcuts and actions on single keys. It earns its keep once the combinations you need to remember outgrow the keyboard: switching scenes and muting the mic while streaming, calling up the same few actions in a video or photo editor, or killing sound and camera fast in a meeting.

What these have in common is that your hands are busy and your eyes are on the screen. Count how often a day you lose your flow trying to remember a shortcut and you will have a rough answer. If it is only a few times, learning the shortcuts may serve you better than any hardware.

When a phone or tablet is enough

If you have never used a button pad, starting with a device you already own is a sensible way to find out what you really use. These situations tend to fit.

• You press around ten actions regularly, and a few of them cover most of your use.
• You stream or edit as a hobby or side project, not all day.
• There is already an unused phone or tablet on your desk.

A larger screen gives you larger keys, and actions that do not fit on one screen can go on extra pages. Even with a single phone you can use it as your everyday phone and prop it up on the desk only when you work.

When physical keys are better

To be fair, physical keys have a real edge: you can press them by feel without looking. During a live stream, where one wrong tap is awkward, that matters. A touchscreen gives your fingertip nothing to find, however big you make the keys.

Control Pad in Any Display can add vibration and a tap sound when you press a key. How strong the vibration is depends on the device, and some have none, so it is not the same as a mechanical click. If you want a dedicated piece of equipment that stays in one spot all day, dedicated hardware is the better fit. For a side-by-side look, read Control Pad vs Stream Deck.

What Control Pad looks like in practice

The Control Pad module in Any Display turns an iPhone, iPad, Android phone or Android tablet into a button pad. You build the layout in Any Display on your computer, pick Control Pad on the phone or tablet app, and it connects over the same Wi-Fi or a USB cable. The first connection is covered in the Control Pad setup guide.

Layouts come in presets such as 3×2, 5×3 and 8×4, or you can set your own grid. You can keep several profiles and let the app switch automatically to the one that matches whichever app is in front: editing keys over your video editor, a mic key over your meeting app.

What you can put on a key

A key can hold anything from a plain shortcut to a link into another app.

• Everyday actions such as shortcuts, launching apps, media playback and volume, and muting the mic
• Shortcuts that open web addresses you visit often
• OBS Studio control, including starting a stream or recording and seeing the mic state
• Plugins from the in-app marketplace (Chrome, Discord, Teams, PowerPoint, Spotify, VLC, Visual Studio Code, Zoom, OBS Studio, window layouts)

You can also build your own plugin from a folder with a settings file and a script. These are not Stream Deck plugin files that you can drop in as they are. They are made for Any Display.

A few things to know before you try it

Control Pad and screen extension are not on at the same time on one device. You switch between them, and the connection is re-established each time. If you were hoping to use one tablet as both a second screen and a button pad at once, keep that in mind. Screen extension is described under second display.

While your phone is the pad, calls and notifications can cover the keys, so Do Not Disturb helps. After a week, note how many keys you pressed regularly and whether hunting for them without feel bothered you. That is usually enough to tell you whether dedicated hardware is worth it.