My goal is to move to nice IP cams one day but for now I have analog cameras and a DVR in the closet hooked to a cheap monitor that’s paid for.

Try the app IPCamViewer by Robert Chou (here is a link to the lite version, I think there is an iOS one as well https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rcreations.ipcamviewer). It can view damn near any brand DVR, that at least let me view stuff remotely.

If you want to up it another level, if your old school DVR supports RTSP, you can probably feed that into something like Frigate for real time alerts and object detection.