Whilst I appreciate your personally open sentiment toward third-party apps at this current time, we have seen time and time-again companies that pivot on a dime and pull the rug under third-party apps very quickly. See: Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft Outlook for iOS, and countless others.
Twitter, Reddit, and Outlook had excellent third-party apps (Tweetie, Alien Blue, Acompli) which were acquired to become the official first-party app. Those apps subsequently got worse due to corporate priorities that were not aligned with the user’s priorities, and so new third-party apps sprang up to fill the gap. Then the rug got pulled, and users are left with only the second-rate first-party apps.
I suspect that I am not alone in desiring a first-rate, first-party app from Plex – especially when it’s a service that we pay for – and being loud when we see corporate priorities becoming unaligned from user’s priorities.
Well said. I shelled out the money for the Apple TV because it provides a premium experience. At this time, the player UI in Plex Experience for tvOS feels as though it was designed for a generic browser-based Linux kernel running on a bargain bin dual core processor, shoved into what can barely be called a “smart TV”. That’s your “lowest common denominator” – and Plex must aim higher than that.
Agreed - if there was an actual, justifiable technology-based reason to implement a custom player, then maybe the community would be more understanding. The thing is, we see Infuse working perfectly… so to us, there’s no apparent reason Plex can’t do the same thing.
Are you referring to Sonos here, rather than Spotify? Spotify messed up with their push to make their app more like TikTok, but Sonos really screwed up with their new app.
Folks pay a premium for Sonos gear, and expect a premium experience - the new Sonos app ain’t it.
Folks pay a premium for the Apple ecosystem, and expect a premium experience - the Plex Experience Preview for tvOS player ain’t it.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t tried Plex Experience on my iPhone much - tvOS is my primary Plex viewing platform. Scrubbing on tvOS is awful: it’s impossible to accurately target a time due to the lack of motion physics, combined with the issue of scrubbing occurring as soon as you swipe to reveal the player controls (rather than Apple’s standardised implementation of requiring you to first pause). YouTube does the same thing as Plex Experience on tvOS, and it’s diabolical - the number of time’s I’ve ended up scrubbing through a video whilst trying to enable captions is ridiculous!! If scrubbing on tvOS is impossible, I can only imagine the issues on iOS.
PiP is much less of a big deal on tvOS than on iOS, but the lack of PiP on either platform is pretty abysmal. Infuse can do it… why can’t Plex!
See: Microsoft’s “New Outlook” app. It’s little more than the Outlook website, shoehorned into an Electron-based web browser masquerading as an “app”. It looks and behaves nothing like any other Office app on Windows or macOS, and it sucks on both platforms. Teams suffers the same problem, too. If a corporation as big as Microsoft can’t build a high-quality consistent cross-platform experience, why are Plex trying to do the same but with a fraction of the human resources? It’s never going to end well and it’s only going to frustrate users!
Agreed. A navigation UI that’s reasonably familiar across platforms is helpful, provided that it feels “at home” on each platform. See: the Search interface using the OS-native keyboard, rather than implementing a custom keyboard which breaks not only muscle memory but also OS-native functionality including Siri dictation, iOS remote app keyboard, and accessibility. But that’s off-topic for this thread.
1000% agreed. When I pick up the remote for my Apple TV, I want a consistent cross-app experience - especially for something as fundamental as the playback UI. When I pick up the remote for a WebOS device, I want an experience that takes advantage of the Magic Remote. Learning a platform once is hard enough for most folks. Learning each app’s individual quirks just ratchets up the challenge, and people sooner just give up.
Given such a strong sentiment in this thread alone, I really hope that @Craig_Holliday, @hsousa, and the wider Plex team will reconsider their stance. I think we would all really love to see you instead pursue the new – and undeniably better – playback stack, paired with the tvOS-native AVPlayerViewController UI.
