**The problem**

Every Mac app I use has ten shortcuts I can never remember and three that do not have a shortcut at all. The usual fix is to buy a piece of hardware that sits on your desk doing nothing most of the day, or to rent a subscription for what is essentially a grid of buttons. I did not want either, and I already had a phone sitting next to the keyboard, so I built the control surface into the phone.

Coast is an iPhone and iPad app plus a free menu bar app on the Mac. They talk over your local Wi-Fi and the Mac posts real input events, so it works in every app you already use with no plugins and no extensions.

You pick a grid size up to 8 by 12 for a maximum of 96 controls per grid and drop in what you want. Keys and modifier chords, hold and sticky keys, two stroke chords like Cmd K Cmd S, D-pads, jog wheels, rockers, turbo keys, joysticks, mouse buttons, media keys, a numpad, an absolute volume slider that drives CoreAudio, screen sharing, gyroscope laser pointers, timers, annotation on screen, screen sharing, menu items, gesture pads, scroll strips, app launchers that pull your Mac's real app list and icons over the wire, URL openers, text macros, name it and it's probably in there. There is also a full multitouch trackpad with the native gesture vocabulary, a remote keyboard, a gamepad mode, a live screen mirror of your Mac, and a mouse mode where the phone lies face up and its rear camera reads the desk surface with the torch as the illumination LED. That last one is FFT phase correlation with an IMU lift cutoff, which is how a real mouse sensor works. It still loses to a ten dollar mouse. I kept it because it is the reason I started developing this app.

**Comparison**

MetaGrid Pro is the closest thing to what Coast does and it is very good at the DAW side, but it runs on iPad, Mac and Vision Pro only, so there is no iPhone app and no Apple Watch app. It is also priced in pieces. The full version is $39.99, lifetime is $199, or you subscribe at $4.99 a month or $44.99 a year, and several control types are separate purchases on top of that, including Gesture Pad at $14.99, Powermacros for Logic at $14.99, XY Pad at $4.99, Pads at $4.99 and Menu Button at $3.99. In Coast every control type is in the one $2.99 unlock, and it runs on the iPhone in your pocket, on iPad, and on your watch.

Stream Deck is the other obvious comparison. The MK.2 hardware is $149.99 and takes up desk space. Stream Deck Mobile gives you six keys free and then charges $2.99 a month, $24.99 a year, or $49.99 once for up to 64 keys and custom layouts. Coast gives you up to 96 cells for $2.99 paid one time, and the cells are not only buttons. You get jog wheels you can spin, joysticks, sliders, a real trackpad and a screen mirror in the same grid, which no button deck does.

If you have used Remote Mouse, that covers the pointer and keyboard half of this. Remote Mouse Pro is $29.99 with more panels sold at $3.99 each. Coast does the pointer and keyboard part and the whole deck part for $2.99 total.

**Pricing**

Coast is free on the App Store and the Mac app is free too. The free tier includes mouse mode, the trackpad, the remote keyboard, the built in starter grids and one custom grid of your own. Coast Pro is a one time $2.99 unlock, no subscription, which opens unlimited custom grids, macros, the screen mirror, draw and laser and air mouse, the color palette and alternate icons, the Apple Watch app and iCloud sync.

iPhone and iPad app: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coast-your-desk-in-hand/id6790821600](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coast-your-desk-in-hand/id6790821600)  
Free Mac app: [https://coast.masn.studio](https://coast.masn.studio/)  
Requires macOS 13 or later and iOS 18 or later, both devices on the same Wi-Fi.

It collects no data at all. No analytics, no crash reporting, nothing leaves your local network.

**Who I am**

I am Mason (LeShan) Chen, an independent developer in Massachusetts, and Coast is a solo project.  
Most things that I make, including Tactile, my haptics app for the Mac: [https://tactile.masn.studio](https://masn.studio/), is on my Github, which can be found at [https://masn.studio](https://masn.studio/)  
Contact: [masonchen204@gmail.com](mailto:masonchen204@gmail.com)  
Privacy policy: [https://coast.masn.studio/privacy](https://coast.masn.studio/privacy)  
Terms of service: [https://coast.masn.studio/terms](https://coast.masn.studio/terms)  
The iPhone and iPad app is on the App Store.

Happy to answer anything, and get feedback.

Coast: use your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch to control your Mac using buttons, macros, trackpad, jog wheels and a real optical mouse