One of the biggest drawbacks of the new downloads feature over sync is that the app must be open for download jobs to run. As soon as the device goes to sleep, or when switching to another app (with Plex still running in the background), the download pauses.
Personally, this is a barrier to using the feature regularly.
Scenarios where background downloads are essential are:
- When a new episode for a series is downloaded, you must open the app for it to sync. If you want to watch something on the subway for example in the morning, you need to open the app and keep it awake every morning for it to download. Sync used to download in the background and was never an issue. It takes the magic away from the feature as it’s no longer a set and forget thing.
- When downloading a lot of content (for a long haul flight for example), you need to leave the device on and awake almost overnight for the queue to process. You need to set your device to never lock and for devices with oled screens this can potentially cause burn in.
- The app occasionally can crash, which clears all progress of anything that hasn’t finished downloading. This is frustrating when you are remote with a slow network connection trying to sync some extra content for offline viewing.
I hope this can be rectified soon, as personally I feel that the feature is borderline useless as there is so much extra TLC needed to get content to download. At times I’ve just downloaded the content on a laptop and copied it to VLC on the iOS device - which just makes Plex feel redundant. It’s great when you’re at home, or somewhere with a fast and stable connection, but as soon as you’re offline and want to access your content, downloads just doesn’t cut it yet.
As always though, thanks to the Plex devs for all their hard work. I do see some value for downloads over sync. I’m just a bit disappointed that we also lost some features in the process as well.
