How to Connect Your iPhone or iPad to a Monitor, TV or Projector, and Actually Fill the Screen

What you need

• An iPhone or iPad that can output video (any USB-C iPhone, any Lightning iPhone with the right adapter, and iPads going back many generations).
• A cable or adapter, or an AirPlay receiver, if you would rather go wireless.
• Optional but transformative: a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.

Step 1, Choose how you'll connect

Option A: a cable (recommended)

Wired is lower latency, doesn't depend on Wi-Fi, and on USB-C devices it charges at the same time. XeOS's setup flow lists the same options you'll find in a shop:

If you plan to work for more than an hour, get a multiport adapter rather than a plain cable. It gives you HDMI, power and a USB-A port for a drive or a dongle from one connector, see the drives guide for what that unlocks.

Option B: AirPlay

XeOS also runs over AirPlay, so an Apple TV or an AirPlay-capable smart TV works with no cable at all:

1. Open Control Centre on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap Screen Mirroring.
3. Pick your Apple TV, Mac or smart TV.
4. Wait until the screen is mirrored, then return to XeOS, it detects the display on its own.

Step 2, Run the setup flow

Open XeOS with the display connected. The first-run flow walks through mouse, keyboard, permissions, the connection itself, and then two things worth pausing on: resolution and scaling.

If your monitor or TV doesn't light up at all, check the obvious things first: is it powered on, and is it on the right input? Some monitors and TVs also need USB-C or DisplayPort features switched on explicitly in their own settings menu before they'll accept a signal.

Step 3, Pick the resolution

XeOS reads the modes your monitor actually reports and lets you choose between them, exactly like a desktop OS. 1920 × 1080 is the safe default; pick higher if your screen supports it and you want more room, lower if you want everything bigger without changing scaling.

This is also where black bars get solved. Mirroring hands the TV a phone-shaped image and lets the TV pad it out. XeOS instead switches the output to a mode the display natively understands and turns off overscan compensation, so the picture reaches the edges of the panel.

Step 4, Set the content scale

Resolution decides how many pixels there are. Content scale decides how big everything drawn on them looks. From across a living room, 130–150% keeps text readable on a TV; at desk distance on a monitor, 100% is usually right. You can change it any time from Settings › Display, in 5% steps between 50% and 200%.

Step 5, Add a mouse and keyboard

XeOS works without them: your phone's screen becomes a trackpad, so you can point at the big screen with your thumb. But a cheap Bluetooth mouse turns the whole thing into a genuine computer. Pair both in iOS Settings › Bluetooth before launching, and XeOS picks them up automatically.

Pointer speed lives in Settings › Mouse. One thing worth knowing: iOS applies its own accessibility tracking speed on top of the app's, so if the cursor feels sluggish at every setting, raise iOS Settings › Accessibility › Pointer Control › Tracking Speed first, then fine-tune inside XeOS.

Step 6, Learn the two buttons that matter

Every window has traffic lights in the corner, plus one extra button XeOS adds:

• Green makes the window fill the display completely, no dock, no title bar, nothing but content. This is the button behind full-screen video, slideshows and presentations.
• Grey switches to Device Layout Mode, which hands that page to your phone's own screen for a moment. It exists because of a genuine iOS limitation, and it's explained in full in the Device Layout Mode guide.

Where to go next

• Watch YouTube full screen, with no ads and no black bars
• Run a photo slideshow on a TV, two ways
• Present slides or a PDF without a laptop
• Browse your files, iCloud Drive and external drives
• Import your bookmarks and passwords so logging in is quick