How am I supposed to use the new App experience to watch downloaded content?

Plex Players Mobile Devices
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Server Version#: 1.41.5.9522
Player Version#: Android version 2025.16.0 (966828402)

I’m getting the kids’ tablets set up to go on a trip soon and found that the Plex app was updated to this new experience, but offline content seems completely broken?

If I open the app while disconnected from the internet, all of the libraries just sit and spin forever whenever I open any of them, even though I know they have content that has been downloaded locally to the tablet.

Is this just completely broken?

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Downloads are the Download section in the menu when you tap on the user avatar on top right, not in the regular library.

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Hm, I do see that, but all I see there is a flat list of individual movies/tv show episodes/etc with no organization whatsoever.

I know in the past there was a way to see things organized into TV shows and Movies and Playlists and whatnot.

Was that removed?

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Downloads is being completely revamped in new app because there were so many issues in previous app for folks ( i know not everyone had issues). Starting with just making sure things do download and enabling things like background downloading.

Grouping, downloading playlists, and other features in previous app are coming as far a I am aware but I do not have an ETA

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It seems a little shortsighted to completely remove those kinds of features that people were definitely using in the hopes of having a better rewrite later. Like, I get it, as a software engineer, sometimes legacy things cause problems, but this definitely creates a not-great experience for users.

Like in my case, I have two young kids, and the old way of grouping these downloads let me have things sorted into things like Shorts (quick 5-10 minute things we might watch before bed), Movies, or TV shows, and I could set them up in one spot and let them pick what they want from there.

But now there’s just one long list of everything (which doesn’t even have pictures? I guess that’s related to the fact that they all say (migrated)?), which is going to make my life harder in the short term for sure.

Also, it looks like I can’t download playlists anymore, so I’m going to have to go in and download a bunch of individual things manually now…

Somewhat unrelated to the original topic, but I’m also seeing that on one of the two tablets I’m setting up, I apparently got signed out of Plex, and when I try to sign in, it just sits and spins forever.

Honestly, from my experience here, it just feels like the whole thing was pushed out before it was ready. You can make a decision to completely rewrite a feature or whatever, but to your customers, that’s not a good justification for things being worse in the new version of the product.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

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Download and install an apk of the previous Plex version, then set the Play store to not update. You can toggle this off after your vacation.

There are so many issues with the new version that are completely fixed when using the last release prior to the code rewrite. Downloads being a huge one.

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The previous APKs are here if you want to install those. Plex for Android - #529 by PlexAndroidReleaser

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Man, I’m very VERY angry about this. I travel in the air all the time. The entire reason why I utilize Plex was because of the download feature and how it could organize my downloads just like the OP said. Now, it’s a jumbled mess. Because I’m on iOS, I have NO choice but to NOT use Plex anymore. How can they think it’s ok to pull features from a product that you paid for - without giving you the option to upgrade or not?

Does anyone have any kind of workaround for us users on iOS? Suddenly my $1,500 iPad Pro became a paperweight.

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You can get the old public IOS version installed (and then turn off automatic updates).

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I’m having the exact same issue as the OP - just with three kids tablets instead of two! I understand the “fix” is to downgrade to an older version of the app, but long-term, is there any plan to fix it in a future release or offer some kind of database conversion tool so that when you try to play something from your library that’s now in downloaded but migrated it will actually play that saved file rather than try to re-fetch or stream from the server?
It took dozens of hours to download all this content over three tablets. I really don’t want that pain again.

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