I’m a plex pass subscriber. My kids access our local plex server without accounts (using networks allowed without auth). It doesn’t make sense for them to have accounts, and also when I tried using accounts it seemed like every time they tried accessing the server they have to log back into an account which meant a parent had to be involved. The solution was access without auth. That led to being nickled and dimed on the ios app – even though I’m a plex pass subscriber for years, I had to unlock watching content on a local network for $5 – which wasn’t a ton of money, but did leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Fast forward to today, when the Plex app was updated on their phones…
Low and behold, you are now forced to sign into an account to even use the app. So the feature I paid for no longer works, and I am back to square one. What even gives here? I spend hundreds of dollars on plex, advocate for plex, and they just continue to make life difficult for paying customers.
They say they care about people running their own media servers, but I just don’t even believe it anymore. I think they want everyone to move over to Jellyfin so they can milk their other revenue streams.
Agreed. It makes no sense. Software as a service is a capital light business model. We are hosting our own content on our own servers. It surely had to cost more money to rebuild everything in a stupid, poor, sloppy, broken, braindead way (this update) than to just keep the lights on as it was before. So all in all it makes no sense.
Imagine trying to convince a netflix user to switch to this UX. Never gonna happen.
Giving them access to your server without authentication makes all their activity appear on the server owner’s account. They will share the “watched” status of all the videos with you and among themselves.
create them each as their own managed user
Take their phone into your hands and log into your Plex user account
enter the Settings of the app (section “User Account”) and activate “Automatic Logon”. You can do this only while logged in as the Server owner! This is intended.
Now “Switch user” to the managed user account and hand over the phone to the child.
Unless they manage to delete the app and reinstall it, it will remember the login and stay on their managed user.
As an additional hurdle, set a PIN on your own (admin) user account. This PIN is requested when they try and Switch user to your admin account. So don’t tell it to them. (Don’t tell them your plex login credentials either!)
This is how it’s designed. Giving them each their own managed user will ensure that
each one has their own “watched” status on any given video
