First I want to thank Plex team for listening to feedback about the search on tvOS. Thank you so much for getting rid of that keyboard and thank you for giving us a STELLAR search view with OS keyboard and dictation support. This was sorely needed and you delivered within a couple of builds on that feedback.
Thank you also for improving the load times for assets in the grid system, like backgrounds on the homepage and poster while scrolling a lot of lines. They are now fast enough to be perused in a production setting. I hope performance improvements will continue in that area to match native performance as close as possible, but it is now satisfactory enough for most users imo.
Here is a compilation of bugs and UX improvements I have collected of 20.0 on Apple TV 4K 2nd Gen, running tvOS 18.x latest
I will highlight with bold problems which I think have increased severity and should be addressed in priority.
UX flow improvements:
- When opening a tv series, if it has lots of seasons, pressing up on the last item in a list of 4 seasons or more does not scroll the screen up to the series description and controls area.
- When opening a tv season, pressing up on the last item in a list of 3 episodes or more does not bring the screen up to the season description and controls area.
- After opening the settings menu and resetting the cache, the white remote cursor goes back to the Home Screen but the side menu stays open. Either change the cursor to stay in the menu, requiring a back press to come back to the general side menu, or close the side menu altogether after performing the cache reset.
- In Libraries, when pressing an item on the left menu (browse, recommend, collections etc), menu should autoclose on click and remote cursor should be set on the first item in the page to mimic the previous UI behavior from the old app. There is no point in letting the menu open and forcing me to press back on the remote if I click on a choice.
- Pressing the search icon in the top menu to enter search and then the back button on the remote to go back, the cursor focus go to the profile picture instead of staying on the search icon.
- On the library > browse view, holding press on an item to open the right side menu then backing out of it puts the cursor on the profile picture instead of the item that was pressed. Same thing with all sorting pills menu and the vertical 3 dots pill.
- Pressing the skip intro/credits button doesn’t skip intro/credits, instead it opens the player menu and put the cursor focus on the playhead, requiring me to do 5 more presses to skip the intro/credit.
- During playback, opening the subtitles menu (bottom left) or the 3 dots menu (bottom right) and pressing the back button to go back to watching exits the playback entirely instead of exiting the menu.
UX Suggestions:
- Please add an option in settings to display seasons as a grid when the number of seasons in a show is more than 5. This makes navigating series like The Simpsons way easier.
- Long pressing the user profile picture should bring up the profile switcher as a quick shortcut, because it currently takes 10 presses from the Home Screen to navigate and enter it.
Bugs:
- Long pressing on a show in Home Screen and selecting go to show, sometimes the background doesn’t load and I can’t find a way to replicate it reliably but it’s happening often.
- Pressing (regular press) on a show in the Home Screen, sometimes the background doesn’t load and I can’t find a way to replicate it reliably but it’s happening often.
- The thumbnail resolution for episodes is quite crappy, compressed and full of artefacts when the uploaded thumbnails on tmdb are 1080P. This is not good because in your new design the thumbnails are taking a huge part of the layout on the screen. On the old app the images are fine and good quality so my guess is this is something client side on the new app? Or the Plex picture transcoder server side is told to generate really low bad quality pictures ? I have noticed the show posters are also not as crisp as in the old native app.
- During playback, on the player control overlay, pressing down 2 times to access the player queue, then pressing up one time bring you back to the player controls instead of showing the chapters.
- This one is wild. Starting the playback of a video with my AirPods Pro on, pressing pause, taking out my AirPods, press play (sounds go through the tv/eARC soundbar), couple of seconds later press pause, put AirPods back on, press play, and the voice track of the audio is gone.
Misc:
- Theme songs are still missing.
Hopefully those can be resolved without too much problem. Outside of Dolby Vision, I think this app is getting in a pretty good shape, keep up the good work!
