The lack of any further staff response tell me there isn’t a plan for the desktop apps but at best, a plan to have a plan. So with lack of any concrete information on the future of the Desktop apps, I will give you my predictions.
First, here’s what can be seen from what is already been public in these forums and elsewhere:
- Plex has made no secret of the desire to have a unified codebase using React Native. Obviously this is with the caveat that RN can’t be done everywhere (such as Roku)
- The mobile clients are already using the RN codebase and TV clients in the works (with the same caveat of where it can be done)
- Since react can also be used in a browser (watch.plex.tv already is), there is no need to maintain a separate web interface. So, app.plex.tv will eventually be similarly updated to this unified code base
- This effectively deprecates the web and web tv interfaces currently used by Plex for Mac/Windows/Linux and HTPC respectively
- This explains the lack of updates for plex web which has had minimal changes in the past year (compare releases before this release to those after)
- Similarly web tv has not any update since June (there are a bunch of platforms for this but this is one)
- The number of employees working on Personal Media within Plex has shrunk significantly over the past few years
Additionally:
- The Desktop apps almost ceased 6-7 years ago. Elan has a few notable posts in a single thread on this.
- A lot of their continued existence is owed to a few advocates in the company for continuing the desktop clients.
- All of these advocates are no longer at Plex
- Plex HTPC wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the fact that one employee hacked together Plex for Mac with the web tv interface to prove it could work.
So, what could the future hold for the Desktop apps? Well, React Native can be used on the desktop with a set of frameworks of which Electron is the most popular. The problem with this is Electron’s media playback stack lacks features I mention in my prior post. While it is possible to do React Native with a better playback stack, such as MPV, this is the less easy route. Additionally, Electron’s playback stack is capable of playing all the ad-support content that Plex has to offer. With the few remaining developers on Personal Media being very busy with what is effectively full app rewrites and with Desktop being the least loved client within the company, will Plex expend the resources to give us a better playback stack which will only service Personal Media users?
What do you think Plex will do?
I leave this conclusion to the reader, but for me, I have disabled the updater in all of my installs of the desktop apps. Should a new desktop app appear, I don’t want a degraded Personal Media experience. Though I expect regardless of Plex’s decisions, we likely will not see a new desktop app in 2026.
P.S. When I was writing the above, I couldn’t help but think of the parallel to the AppleTV. Its built-in playback stack from the first generation to current was only capable of playing the type of content on the iTunes Music Store and later AppleTV+. Over the years, Apple added additional capabilities to their stack on their devices, but only when they similarly expanded the content available in their purchase/rent/streaming content. Playing anything outside this list of codecs or containers (like MKV) required another playback stack.
