I wish I hadn’t updated the app to the new experience.
The main way that I use downloads is to download a “Smart Playlist” that approximates “On Deck”, so that when new episodes of TV shows I’m watching are added, they get automatically downloaded to my mobile devices, so that I can watch them on the go without using mobile data.
On the previous version of the app, I was able to set a playlist to download, and so I would get all future episodes of any show that was “On Deck”.
In the new experience, I don’t see an option to set the playlist to download, so I would have to manually set individual episodes/seasons/shows to download. This is quite frustrating and almost not worth the trouble.
Thankfully, the Android app doesn’t seem to have been crippled in that way yet. EDIT: Yep–the Android app is now broken in this respect, too, as of 2025-04-10. And the progress indicator on downloaded content that was migrated stays at zero, even though the number counts up, and it’s also disjoint from the main entry, so it doesn’t sync its progress. Yikes, this is a disaster.
I guess this is mostly in the spirit of feedback, but if anybody knows of a workaround, I’m all ears.
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I am with you! Can’t believe I can’t download a Playlist anymore on this new app. I created a feature request, so please vote.
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I realize that they completely rebuilt the clients, so it’s not like they technically removed the feature–they just failed to implement it again–but from a user’s perspective, this is a removal of a feature and therefore a regression, which renders it a bit odd that we have to beg via a “feature request” to get back the functionality that we previously had. Nevertheless, I definitely voted for that. Thanks for filing that, @an291211!
I gave it three months. I tried valiantly to endure bug after bug and limitation after limitation, but I’ve lost track of all the problems. I found myself aggravated and enraged every single time I used the app. I was able to play content less than half the time. I’m so disappointed. I finally gave in and downgraded to the last version before this new experience.
As a product manager–and a huge fan of Plex in general–this whole thing has deeply hurt my soul.
Thanks for the feedback. We haven’t built this functionality yet, but it is on the list of areas to address. We have started adding in grouped download functionality, starting with seasons. This will be expanded to include things like playlists.
Thank you for acknowledging, @McWanke, and for being gracious about it.
But just to be clear, the inconveniences are much deeper than just being unable to download smart playlists. There’s also the download size bug, there’s the inexplicable inability to play certain content (that plays on the web version on mobile just fine) with inscrutable error messages, the unintuitive navigation, the various UI jank, the overly sensitive screen rotation stuttering, the fact that playing a title doesn’t preferentially use the downloaded version if it’s available, the need to engage in seemingly endless manual retries when downloads fail (rather than its automatically retrying), the fact that when connected to Android Auto, it no longer registers as a media player, so Android Auto controls (eg, pause/play) don’t work, and probably quite a bit more that I’m forgetting right now.
I still love Plex, and I’m likely to continue using it, but I’ve been so disappointed with the mobile app experience, especially the new one. As a technologist, I understand the desire to rebuild things from the ground up, rather than trying to make incremental improvements (as well as the reasons to do one versus the other in various contexts), but it doesn’t seem that this has gone especially well–at least not for me and my use of Plex.
I sure do hope that all the various bugs will eventually be squashed and that the experience exceeds the previous versions’ before too long.
