How to Turn Off AirPlay
To turn off AirPlay, open Control Center, tap Screen Mirroring, then tap Stop Mirroring. For a video sent from one app, tap that app's AirPlay button and choose your iPhone instead. Turning off Automatically AirPlay under AirPlay & Continuity stops the TV from reconnecting by itself. Screen Mirroring: Smart TV, our iOS 15 app, stops with its own button too.
Why AirPlay Reconnects on Its Own
A television that lights up with no one touching a phone is rarely a mirrored screen. Screen Mirroring, the feature behind Control Center's Stop Mirroring button, only ever starts when a person opens Control Center and picks a TV by hand, so it is not the usual explanation for a set that comes on by itself.
What is happening instead usually belongs to video played inside an app that supports AirPlay, not to mirroring. Apple builds iPhones to discover and automatically connect to an Apple TV 4K or a smart TV used often, once that iPhone and that TV have connected before on the same Wi-Fi network. Start a video in an app used regularly, on a phone that has AirPlayed to that TV before, and the picture can jump over there without a tap. It is a convenience feature, built for a household where the same television gets used the same way most nights, and it is doing exactly what Apple designed it to do.
Some of this arrives as a notification asking first, rather than connecting outright, but either way it is the same setting deciding what happens, and the same switch stops both.
The Wi-Fi network matters more than it seems. An iPhone on mobile data, on a guest network, or anywhere the TV is not, cannot suggest or connect to it automatically, no matter how many times the two have paired before. A TV that keeps reconnecting on its own is proof the phone and the TV share a network right now, which makes this a preference rather than a network fault.
The first time an iPhone reaches a new television, nothing connects on its own no matter how the setting is configured. The automatic part only ever applies to a television that phone has already used.
Nothing on the phone is broken. A setting called Automatically AirPlay is simply doing its job, and it can be told to stop.
How to Stop AirPlay From Automatically Connecting to TV
Automatically AirPlay sits under AirPlay & Continuity on the iPhone, and switching it off is what stops the habit. After that, a video reaches a television only when someone chooses one by hand, the same way AirPlay has always worked when started deliberately. Both devices still need to share a Wi-Fi network before any connection happens at all, automatic or not, so the fix only ever changes what happens on a network the TV already sits on.
This is a setting on the phone, not a setting on the television, so nothing about it changes what the TV itself can receive. Anyone in the house can still start a session on that TV by hand, from any device that supports AirPlay, whenever they choose to.
Turning this off does not turn off AirPlay itself. A TV picked by hand still receives whatever is sent to it the moment someone taps it, and a video started in a familiar app still plays normally once a television is chosen on purpose. What stops is the guesswork: the television no longer lights up because a video in some app decided it should, and a phone left on a coffee table stays a phone.
Stopping a Video Instead of the Whole Screen
AirPlay behaves differently depending on what put the picture on the screen. A mirrored screen, the kind Screen Mirroring shows, only ever stops from Control Center. A single video sent from inside an app, a browser or a video app rather than the whole screen, is a separate case: the AirPlay icon sits inside that app's own player next to the usual playback controls, and tapping it opens a short list of where the video can go.
Picking the iPhone from that list is what brings the video back to the phone. Apple describes it as tapping the AirPlay icon inside whichever app is streaming, then choosing the iPhone from the list, a move that happens inside that app and never needs a trip to Control Center at all.
The two controls do not overlap. Stopping a mirrored screen from Control Center will not touch a video already playing through an app's own AirPlay button, and the other way around is also true, which is usually why stopping one leaves someone surprised the other is still going.
Turn Off AirPlay on iPad
An iPad turns off AirPlay the same way an iPhone does. Apple's own AirPlay guide covers the iPhone and the iPad together, and the Screen Mirroring button in Control Center works the same on both: whatever is on the iPad's screen stops appearing on the television the moment that button is tapped, exactly as it does on a phone.
The Automatically AirPlay setting belongs to that same guide, so an iPad that keeps reconnecting to a television on its own can be switched to the same choice described above.
Screen Mirroring: Smart TV works on iPhone and iPad, so an iPad reconnecting to a TV by itself is still an AirPlay habit rather than anything this app does. Ending a session this app started works the same way on an iPad as it does on an iPhone: stop the broadcast on the iPad for a mirrored screen, or the stop button in the app for a single photo or video.
What Turning It Off Does Not Change
Turning off Automatically AirPlay, or stopping a single session from Control Center, does not remove AirPlay from the iPhone. A television can still be chosen by hand at any time, from Control Center for a mirrored screen or from an app's own AirPlay button for a single video, exactly as before. The only difference is who decides when it happens: a person, instead of a setting reacting to a video that started playing.
Manual AirPlay sessions, and any video played through an app's own AirPlay button, work exactly as they did before either setting was touched.
If an App Is Doing the Mirroring Instead
Not every television has AirPlay built in, and that gap is exactly why apps like Screen Mirroring · Smart TV exist. Turning this one off works its own way, separate from everything above: a mirrored screen it started stops when you stop the broadcast on your iPhone, and sending a single photo or video from the app instead of the whole screen stops with the stop button inside the app itself.
Its App Store listing describes an app that mirrors an iPhone screen to a Smart TV in real time, streams video from apps like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, casts photos and videos from the camera roll to the big screen, plays mobile games for a bigger experience, and displays video calls for better visibility. It names Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast, Samsung, LG and other major Smart TVs as supported, and describes itself as compatible with AirPlay and popular streaming devices, so a television with AirPlay already built in is not a reason to skip it.
The idea behind it is straightforward: turn a TV into an extra screen for whatever is already on the iPhone, whether that is a video, a set of photos, a game, or a work call, without needing the television itself to support anything in particular.
The app remembers your TV, so picking it again later is one tap, with no code to type.
For the first-time setup, see connect iPhone to TV. If the whole screen keeps showing up rather than one AirPlay video, the separate guide to turn off screen mirroring covers that case.
Skip AirPlay's Settings Menu
Screen Mirroring: Smart TV remembers your TV, so picking it again is one tap, with no code to type.
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