AirType: Trackpad & Keyboard

Hold your iPhone like a mouse and turn it. The pointer on your Mac goes where you aim, because the phone is the body of the mouse. AirType is one app in two halves, and both of them are on this listing. The iPhone half sends. The Mac half receives. You download this once and you get both, and neither half does anything on its own. WHAT YOU DO WITH IT Swipe to move the pointer. Tap to click. Two fingers to scroll, and it keeps rolling after you lift, with the same momentum a Mac trackpad has. Pinch to zoom. Tap the keyboard button and type with your own keyboard, emoji and all. There is a modifier row for command, control, option and shift, and a top row for volume, brightness and playback. MOUSE MODE Tap the mouse key and the phone becomes the mouse. Aim it at your Mac and the pointer follows your wrist, the way it follows a mouse across a desk. One finger scrolls. Tap to click, and tap the top right corner to right-click. A two finger double tap opens Mission Control. Mouse mode uses the phone's motion sensors, and the motion data stays on the phone. Tap the key again and it is a trackpad. TRACKPAD GESTURES The gestures your Mac's own trackpad knows. Three fingers up opens Mission Control, three fingers down shows the windows of the app in front, and three fingers sideways switches Spaces. Four fingers pinched opens Launchpad, which macOS 26 calls Apps, and four fingers spread shows the desktop. Two fingers in from the right edge opens Notification Center. A two finger double tap zooms in on what you tapped. ABOUT THE PERMISSIONS THIS APP ASKS FOR Three, and each one is asked for at the moment you first use the feature that needs it. Local Network. This is how a keystroke gets from your hand to your Mac. iOS shows a dialog the first time AirType looks for your Mac on your network. AirType looks for one service, its own, and it connects to nothing else it finds. Microphone. Only for hold to talk. It opens while your finger is down on the dictation button and closes the moment you lift it. Speech Recognition. This is what turns what you said into the text that gets typed. It runs on this phone. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising and no third party SDK. THE MAC HALF COMES WITH IT The half that runs on your Mac installs from this same App Store page, at no extra cost. It lives in the menu bar and takes about a minute to set up. There is nothing else to buy and nothing else to go find. TRY IT WITH NO MAC AT ALL Tap "See how it works on this phone alone" on the first screen. A cursor appears, and turning the phone moves it. The trackpad, the gestures and the keyboard all respond, and a line under the status bar reads back the exact message each one produced. It runs entirely on this phone and opens no connection at all. SIX DIGITS, ONCE Your Mac shows six digits. Type them once. From then on the pair finds itself: open the app and it is already connected. WHAT IT COSTS Everything is open for the first seven days. After that, one payment of $24.99 unlocks mouse mode, the trackpad gestures, pinch to zoom, the keyboard, the modifier row, hold to talk dictation and landscape mode, and it is the only payment there is. Moving the pointer with a finger, clicking and scrolling are free, today and always, during the trial and after it ends. So the phone works as a trackpad for free, and the payment buys the mouse, the gestures and the keyboard. IT WORKS AWAY FROM WI-FI Sharing a network is faster, and AirType connects straight from this phone to your Mac when there is none to share. NOTHING LEAVES THE TWO DEVICES There is no server in the middle. This phone opens an encrypted link straight to your Mac and sends to nothing else it can see. A pairing code is spent the moment it is used, so a device that was never paired has no way in. Requires macOS 13 or later on the Mac.