In mid-2018, I think all of us are at least a little desensitized when it comes to caring about downloading new apps on your smartphone. Back in 2010-2012, it felt like a new app was coming out every day that was vastly expanding the functionality of your device in some new clever way you didn’t even realize you needed. The best example of this for me was the advent of the flashlight app with the iPhone 4. When they started flooding the App Store, I was like, “This is the dumbest thing ever, why would you want an app to make your iPhone a flashlight?" Oh, how wrong I was. Now days, I use the dang flashlight functionality so much it’s borderline second nature to just flip it on whenever I need light for anything. Since discovering Tunity (Free) a few weeks ago, I’m having similar epiphanies. It allows you to hear any TV, whether its muted or not, anywhere, just by letting the app scan the screen for a few seconds. Tunity feels like magic- Particularly when paired with AirPods, and you seriously just have to try it.

Here’s a situation I’ve found myself in more times than I could even count: Being from Chicago, we have two baseball teams: The Cubs and the White Sox. It’s infinitely more fashionable to be a Cubs fan, so if the Cubs and Sox are playing at the same time, there’s a 99% chance that the sound will be playing for the Cubs. Sure, you can totally watch baseball muted, but it’s just not the same. Or, maybe, there’s another game on you really don’t care about but they’ve got another TV showing Wheel of Fortune (or any other game show that’s hard to follow without sound). Before Tunity, you’d just shrug, and be like, “Welp there’s no reality that exists where they’re going to switch the sound from the Cubs to the Sox." Tunity solves that problem.

You open up the Tunity app, let it scan the TV you want to hear sound from, and if it’s a supported channel (most over the air and standard cable channels seem to be supported) the audio will just start playing on your phone. If it’s out of sync at all, you can fine tune the delay to make the audio 100% match up with the picture. It is borderline ridiculous how well this works. Additionally, since just having your iPhone playing sound at the bar is kind of annoying, it flawlessly works over Bluetooth too for whatever wireless (or wired) headphones you have. I’ve even been out and had my partner put one AirPod in her ear while I put one in mine and we’re both able to hear the TV audio. It’s seriously like magic.

Tunity is totally free, and it seems like they make their money by running ads in the app. It’s really unobtrusive, but it would be cool to have some kind of “Pro" version you could buy with no ads and maybe better audio quality (not that the audio quality is bad, but I’m just thinking of how Spotify has their “normal" quality and then “extreme" quality for paying folks). Either way, it’s super, super cool, and definitely something you should have in your “Utilities" folder on your iPhone. The first time you use it, you’ll totally see why I’m so wild about telling other people about it.