Teleparty alternative that has a real mobile app?

Just to be fair to Teleparty — it's genuinely great on desktop and it's free, and if your whole group is on laptops it's hard to beat. The problem is exactly what you hit: it's a browser extension, so there's no phone experience at all. Once even one person is on mobile it falls apart. Rave is mobile-first but its iOS availability has been spotty, which is why I stopped relying on it.

+1 to Watchly from the Android side. I was skeptical because a lot of these are basically a virtual browser (Kosmi, Hyperbeam) that you load on a phone — they work but everyone's watching one shared low-res stream instead of their own clean stream. Watchly syncs your actual app/login, so quality stays full. The voice chat being included is what sold my group, we dropped the separate call entirely. Good overview here: best app for virtual watch parties.

I'll add the honest caveat so nobody's surprised: with any of these (Teleparty included) everyone needs their own subscription to whatever service you're watching — none of them rebroadcast one screen, that's a re-streaming thing nobody legit does. Watchly was still the smoothest for our mixed phone/laptop crowd. If you specifically do Netflix nights, watch Netflix with friends remotely walks through it.

Used Twoseven and Scener before — Scener is desktop-only like Teleparty, and Twoseven leans on its own file uploads. Neither fixed the phone problem. The native-app thing really is the differentiator here. If you want the step-by-step on actually running the night, how to host a virtual watch party is solid.

Update: installed Watchly on my iPhone, two friends joined on Android and one on a laptop, and it just worked — synced perfectly and the built-in voice chat meant no extra call. This is exactly the teleparty alternative with a mobile app I was after. Thanks all!