FireTV app unusably buggy

Plex Players
1

The app on my Fire TV box has become unusable. This thing crashes constantly in numerous scenarios pretty reliably:

  • After returning to the menus after watching a video and attempting to browse
  • After waking the FireTV from sleep and attempting to browse
  • After starting a second episode of a tv show after watching the first
  • When switching between libraries when browsing
  • Just randomly in the middle of a video without warning (at this point I expect it to happen at least a dozen times a night over the course of about 3 hours)

For some reason, when I reload the app and press “left” to get to my list of libraries, even though I was on “Home”, it thinks I’m on a random library halfway down the list. About 50% of the time it crashes if it has this library incorrectly selected when I try to navigate away from it.

There is also a wonderfully obnoxious behavior when browsing collections: It will seemingly refresh at random intervals and jump you all the way back to the top of the collection while you’re trying to browse.

To head off the usual stupid “turn it off and on again” suggestions: yes I cleared cache data, yes I nuked the app and reinstalled it, yes my connection to the server is perfectly stable (none of these issues on PCs on the same network).

I don’t understand how this thing keeps becoming more buggy and unstable. Maybe instead of adding new features (that no one asked for, like Tidal), you focus on fixing the stuff that used to work for years that you somehow broke lately?

I’m just so baffled as someone 10 years into a software engineering career…do you guys not have any sort of regression testing to make sure your new features don’t break existing (pretty essential) core functionality?

I love Plex and it’s so disappointing to watch the quality of this program steadily decline over the last couple of years.

Still waiting on the insanely simple fix for aspect ratio of posters when browsing “Other Video” collections, so I’m not going to hold my breath for something more complicated than a minor display bug.

2

Yes, I find it very buggy too and I only try it every few weeks to confirm that it still totally sucks. So I have to use something else day to day if I want to enjoy watching media rather than getting frustrated trying to watch media. I would suggest that you at least provide the version numbers of the server/app (and the server platform and actual FireTV hardware you’re using) so that there is some ability to follow the progression on the fixes — since it’s going to be SLOOOOO…W based the multitudes of major problems that have gone unfixed for months.