The universal remote is one of those gadgets that sells itself in a single sentence. You've got a pile of devices that all need controlling, and here's one thing that controls them all. It's such an obviously good idea that you never really have to explain it to anyone. And yet, decades into the home-entertainment era, the perfect universal remote still doesn't exist.
The one that almost cracked it
Plenty of companies have chased this dream, but one product got closer than the rest: the Harmony. For years it was the best universal remote on the market — arguably the only one that mattered. It promised to tame the tangle of TVs, cable boxes, soundbars, game consoles and streaming sticks that had colonized living rooms everywhere. For a lot of households, the Harmony genuinely delivered, turning a coffee-table graveyard of clickers into a single device.
But even the Harmony couldn't fully make it work. That's the tension at the heart of a recent episode of The Verge's Version History podcast, which digs into the rise and eventual fade of the iconic remote. As the show's hosts lay out, the Harmony's story is really the story of how hard it is to build one product that plays nicely with hundreds of others — devices made by competing companies with little incentive to cooperate.
Why "control everything" is so hard
The core problem is fragmentation. Every manufacturer speaks its own language. Infrared codes vary, inputs change names, and the moment you add a new device, your tidy one-remote setup needs reprogramming. Harmony tried to solve this with a massive database of devices and activity-based controls — press "Watch TV" and it would fire off the right sequence of commands to flip everything to the correct input. When it worked, it felt like magic. When it didn't, you were back to juggling four remotes and a manual.
On the podcast, The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel and John Higgins are joined by Matt Rogers — CEO of Mill and a former cofounder of Nest — to unpack why even a beloved, well-engineered product struggled to become the forever solution. Part of the answer is that the living room itself kept shifting underneath it, as smart TVs, voice assistants and streaming apps changed what "controlling your stuff" even means.
A familiar lesson for the smart home
The Harmony's arc is a cautionary tale that echoes far beyond remotes. The same fragmentation that doomed the universal remote haunts today's smart-home gadgets, where competing standards and walled gardens make "one app to rule them all" just as elusive. The dream of seamless, universal control is as appealing as ever — and, it turns out, just as impossible.
For anyone who ever owned a Harmony, the episode is a nostalgic and slightly bittersweet listen: a reminder that sometimes the best version of a great idea still isn't quite enough.
Source: The Verge, "Version History" podcast.
