On a work laptop, the firewall is usually not yours to change. Intune, Group Policy or a Defender security baseline can block what AirPlay needs, and can quietly undo the rules ScreenSolo adds when it installs.

The symptom is almost always the same: ScreenSolo runs fine, the receiver is On, both devices are on the same Wi-Fi — and your PC never appears in the iPhone's Screen Mirroring list.

Check these first

  • You are on the corporate Wi-Fi, not the guest network. Guest networks block device-to-device traffic by design.
  • Your phone and PC are on the same network. Many companies put phones on a separate wireless network from laptops. Discovery does not cross between them.
  • The Bonjour Service is running. Press Windows+R, type services.msc, and look for Bonjour Service. ScreenSolo needs it for discovery, and the installer offers to add it if it is missing. On a managed PC, that install may be blocked.
  • You are not on the VPN. Some Zero Trust and secure-DNS tools swallow discovery traffic. Disconnect, try again, reconnect afterwards.

If all four look right and it still does not appear, it is almost certainly policy. That needs your IT team.

What to send your IT team

Copy the block below into a ticket. It lists everything ScreenSolo needs and nothing it does not.

ScreenSolo — AirPlay receiver, inbound rules required

Program:  C:\Program Files\ScreenSolo\ScreenSolo.exe
Profile:  Private and Domain

  UDP 5353   mDNS / Bonjour discovery
             multicast 224.0.0.251 and ff02::fb
  TCP 7100   AirPlay control (HTTP/RTSP)
  TCP 7200   Video mirroring stream

All traffic stays on the local network. ScreenSolo does not need
these ports open to the internet, and mirroring is never routed
off the LAN.

The installer already tries to add these two rules, named ScreenSolo AirPlay TCP and ScreenSolo mDNS UDP. A managed device often replaces or ignores them, so IT may need to add the equivalent through Intune or Group Policy.

Simpler alternative for IT: allow the ScreenSolo program itself inbound on Private and Domain, rather than listing ports. That covers the dynamic UDP ports used for audio and timing without opening anything wider.

The one thing a firewall rule cannot fix

Many corporate wireless networks turn on client isolation (sometimes called AP isolation or peer-to-peer blocking). It stops devices on the same Wi-Fi from talking to each other at all. No firewall rule will get around it, because the traffic never reaches your PC.

If phones and laptops are on separate networks, IT would need an mDNS reflector between them, which most will not want to set up for one app.

In both cases the realistic answer is a different network — a meeting-room Wi-Fi, a personal hotspot, or your home network.

If IT cannot help

ScreenSolo works normally on any network you control. Everything else in the app — desktop recording, Smart Capture, the editor, export — is unaffected by any of this. Only the iPhone mirroring depends on the network.

Related: AirPlay isn't showing up on my iPhone covers the ordinary, non-corporate causes. Installing on Windows covers the standard firewall prompt.