Can confirm this happens consistently for me as well on an iPhone 16 pro, running iOS 26.1.
Happens on my phone as well but less often now than it used to.
Same issue for me. iPhone 17 pro max. Plex freezes the entire iPhone when you pause the movie. Freezes for five minutes. Not able to reboot during this time.
This is the worst bug I’ve ever seen for iPhones and I’ve used an iPhone since the very first one. It will totally lock up the phone for a few minuets and we are unable to force power it off. This could potentially be a bug in iOS itself. Might also lead to some exploit
I can confirm this still happens for iphone 17 pro.
Just updated the latest app verison, please fix it, it’s unusable.
+1
This is very bad bug
This is also an issue on an ipad pro m4.
About 80-90% of the time, swiping up to task switch while a video is playing will cause not only the player to hang, but also the entire UI, to the point where the device will not even respond to a power button press. I didn’t think an app could even do that under iOS.
This appears to happen regardless of whether the video is actively playing, or is paused. The only reliable workaround is to kill the video with the “x” button and then switch tasks, which is a major embuggerance.
The duration of the hang is quite variable. Sometimes it lasts only for a few seconds, then the system responds as expected. In this case, the plex app can be returned to and playback resumed.
Most of the time, the hang is much longer, often up to 30 seconds or more. During that time, the device is completely unresponsive, and recovers when the OS presumably forcibly terminates the app, which has to be restarted from cold.
This is not iOS 26-specific. This has been happening from day one of the revamped plex app, and I only recently updated from ipadOS 18 in the last week or so. The upgrade to the newer OS version has not affected this in any way.
This was never an issue in the old version of the app. If I could go back to that, I would.
At the risk of digressing into opinion, the number of easily-reproducible bugs in the overhauled app is appalling. There are a multitude of bugs that were introduced with the new version months ago, and there has been zero progress on fixing any of them.
1 Like
And at the risk of replying to myself, I discovered the sidebar link to the beta version that’s handled through the ios testflight app. For what it’s worth, the current version (“2025.31.0 (1411)”) appears to be significantly better in this area, though the problem is definitely not fixed.
In this beta version, I put the problem’s reproducibility at a much lower 10% or so. Additionally, when the hang does occur on task switching, it appears to only last for a few seconds before the task switch actually occurs. I’ve also yet to see the app completely crash; I’ve only been using it a short while, but I would have expected to see it completely bomb by now.
There’s obviously still a major problem in this area, but intentional or not, the beta does seem to be much improved.
+1
I’m also seeing this fairly consistently on my iPhone 17
