Remotes are cheap and break regularly

The Roku mobile app is pretty good for turning your phone or tablet into a Roku remote in order to control your device, and it will add the voice function and private listening feature if your current Roku remote doesn't have those things.

But you can't use it as a full substitute for an actual Roku remote because if you ever needed to do a factory reset on your Roku device you can't set up the Roku with the mobile app remote, you need a real Roku remote. But aside from that one thing I think that the Roku mobile app remote feature is pretty cool.

I haven't tried it yet with private listening enabled, but I am willing to bet you can listen for a lot longer on your mobile device as opposed to an actual Roku Voice Remote which has private listening, because those will drain your double A batteries pretty quick.

Also I would suspect that you won't get the annoying battery notification popping up on your TV screen since the mobile remote is not an actual Roku remote paired to your device, I don't know that for certain I'm just assuming.

That battery notification is so annoying because a lot of the time it malfunctions and pops up when you don't want it to. After all the complaints over the years Roku still will not update the Roku firmware to include an option to disable this broken notification.