The stream is choppy or laggy

The stream is a live video of the phone's screen coming to you, and your taps going back. How it feels depends on your own connection and on how far you are from the region where the phone runs. Neither is something we can fix from here, but both are things you can check.

Read the latency pill

The viewer measures the round trip to the phone and shows it as Excellent (under 50 ms), Good (under 100), Fair (under 200) or Poor. Pin it from Preferences if it keeps hiding. Poor means the trip itself is long; the usual reasons are a distant region, a slow or congested line, or a mobile connection that is switching between towers.

Check your connection first

• Try another network: mobile data instead of Wi-Fi, or the other way round. A big difference tells you where the problem is.
• Move closer to the router, or off a busy network. Video needs steady bandwidth more than it needs a lot of it.
• A VPN on your own device adds a detour to every packet. Turn it off for a moment and compare.

Check the region

The region cannot be changed on an existing phone, but you can see what a nearer one would give you: the Store tab measures the round trip to each available region while you are choosing. If a phone's region is far from where you usually are, a new phone nearer to you will stream better. Choosing a region.

Is it the phone or the network?

With the stats pinned, the viewer shows frames produced by the phone against frames it managed to show you. Thirty produced and twelve shown is the network dropping frames on the way; twelve and twelve is the phone itself struggling to draw, which usually means an app on it is working hard. The Resources card on the phone's screen shows whether its processor is flat out. A restart clears most of that.

Things that do not affect the stream

• The phone's proxy. A proxy changes where the phone's own internet traffic leaves from, not the video path to you.
• Other viewers. Several people can watch at once without slowing each other down, up to the limit.