Great question,
I don’t think it has ever been answered directly. I’ll try to explain it as well as I can.
There are two parts to the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 apps:
“Platform” or “Platform Update”.
This is what Sony gives us, and we build our app on top of it, This is the update you get from the PSN Store, and has version numbers like 1.01 or 1.02.
These updates are what give us new access to PS3/PS4 hardware, sometimes it’s better video playback, USB keyboard, harmony remote or fix underlying platform bugs (e.g., network dies under certain conditions) essentially things that are out of our hands (we don’t have much control in PS land)
We don’t do platform updates that frequently because of few reasons,
- Sony doesn’t give us many updates (usually one every few months), and unless we get an updated platform, there is no point in doing another release based on the old platform.
- Sometimes platform updates we get from Sony break things. That makes some platform versions unusable for us, so we have to wait for the nex one hoping they fix the issues we reported.
- Some releases just don’t have any changes that would effect Plex.
- Platform updates are HARD! We have to do a lot of testing to make sure everything still works (as I mentioned before, sometimes they don’t)
- Sony’s submission process is COMPLICATED, when I say complicated, I mean 10s to 100s of emails and weeks/months of application forms and back and forth between Sony and us.
Application Update
These are the updates you get automagically anytime you load the app. This updates pretty much what you see, all the Plex UI, all the logic and features related to Plex itself is updated every time you restart the app. That’s the version number that looks like 2.xx.xx, e.g., 2.10.8.
We do updates like these every few weeks, and they fix bugs and add features all over the place. Sometimes we even do workarounds for platform bugs that we didn’t catch originally and are affecting users.
I hope this answers your question.
