Is the iOS app embarrassingly unreliable for everyone?

Plex Players Mobile Devices
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Server Version#: 8.2.2 (Latest 30jul2023)
Player Version#: 1.74.1.3913-9baac009 Latest 30jul2023
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>

I am at home, on reliable local WiFi6 network 95% of my waking hours. I don’t even bother trying to access my data over internet since I have so much downloaded to my iPhone with 1tb drive. And yet the iOS Plex app is just not very reliable. Is it just me?
iPhone13maxpro with 1tb drive.
Same unreliability across the last couple versions of iOS so I don’t think its the firmware to blame.
Mostly just trying to keep Plex as a music player to replace built-in Apple Music app, staying in sync with home server and not use Apple iTunes. I can’t say I’m even close to being a power user for this app and yet find it unreliable: I can’t imagine what someone dealing with video or internet based usage is fighting.

  • 20% of the time Plex crashes on iPhone shortly after startup.
  • Songs playing fine, then next song just doesn’t start
  • Skip forward and back to fix above non-playing song, it plays along with the other song so now two songs playing
  • Open ‘Downloads’ and there’s nothing there even though there’s plenty downloaded. Kill the app and relaunch then all the downloads are there. Come on, these are local files for Pete’s sake.
  • Playing local downloaded music just fine… Then suddenly the app just evaporates and you have to re-launch
  • Switch from Plex to Messenger and Plex evaporates
  • On earbuds… Get a notification like Siri reading a text… Music stops for the notification (like it should) then doesn’t restart automatically like it should. Tap the earbud to restart it, and Apple Music instead of Plex starts playing even though Plex is the foreground app.
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A post was split to a new topic: PMS crashing

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It’s unbelievable, I’ve been a user for years. I love Plex, I have it on multiple servers, HTPCs, android devices, tablets, macOS, Windows, Linux, iPads, iPhones,… you name it. All my family members use it because of me, and most of my friends now either use it or have their own personal servers with PMS because of me, and I have Plex Pass and most of my friends also have it.
and after all that, I can’t watch a 10min video peacefully on my iPad. and this has been going on for almost 9 months, I get a few hundred crashes on a good day ( yes a few hundred, I’m not exaggerating) and Plex downloads are embarrassingly slow. I started using Infuse Player and connected with my Plex account, it has better download management, better reliability, and better streaming. I can’t believe that after all this dedication to Plex and paying for the Plex Pass, I end using another third-party player.

1 Like
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I’m finding iOS player clients to be highly unreliable from a crash after start-up (and other times also). Many threads about this, but IMHO not enough focus or communication from the Plex team about such an impacting issue for so many.

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PMS for Mac > 1.27
iPad mini 4 iPadOS 14 & 15

Same here:

  • AV sync is always dung
  • AV sync is is pathetically whale dung if playback UI position is ever changed (eg, RR, FF)—shifts by many seconds
  • Playback buffering and stuttering always (only happens with Plex)

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These issues do not occur with:

  • HDHomeRun, neither live, nor playback
  • Streaming apps (YouTube, PrimeVideo, PosiTV, Chosen,
  • Safari streaming

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My church even does a better job streaming than Plex.

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Apparently, reading the recent Plex Engineering life blog, that Plex is not prioritizing quality, nor reliability.

If I understand correctly, such fundamental issues are not even scheduled to be remedied.

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I take it you know that version of Plex was released between May and June of 2022? It might be an option to upgrade your server to a recent version (latest public version is 1.32.6)

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tom80H,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ^

“PMS for Mac [Greater than] 1.27”

I would have written " ≥ [Greater-than or Equal-to] 1.27.0.5897", but I wasn’t sure the “≥” character would be correctly displayed on PC’s.

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Like a lot of other users posting their bug experiences, PMS abruptly degraded ~17 months ago (14 June 2022) with the general release of 1.27.0.5897.

PMS has been dung ever since 1.27.0.5897 (perhaps since ß release 1.27.0.5849), especially when serving iOS, Apple TV and macOS client applications. (I did not realize until 1.27 that I needed to take careful notes and retain every PMS version for likely future back-grade. My personal notes first show reverting back from 1.27.0.5889.)

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FWIW, to my great dismay, I have installed, and I have been abused by, every PMS general release after 1.26.2.5797. (I have also reluctantly tested many beta releases, with similar injury.)

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The five PMS general released versions 1.25.8 – 1.26.2 seem to have been fine. Similarly, the tvOS and iOS Plex player apps versions 8.0 – 8.5 seemed to work ok. (Until ~July 2022, I did not test the Plex play for Mac for watching, merely used for administration and setup.)

I first installed PMS March 2022, version 1.25.8.5621. Ever since June 2022 (PMS 1.27), Plex has been, to quote my wife, “a piece of [dung]!”
Both the tvOS and iOS Plex player apps since 8.6 have poor-to-non-functional (literally). Until recently, the Plex player for Mac app for most of the last year could not play anything.
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The iOS app has especially been dung for the last 17+ months:

  • AV sync is pathetic if one ever changes playback position (ie, uses the playback scrub bar, or the Rewind_10s and FF_30s UI controls);
  • Audio clarity is ALWAYS very bad.

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(One suspects Plex engineers fundamentally simply do not understand streaming reality. I do not experience these issues with HDHomeRun, YouTube, PrimeVideo, Vimeo, nor even with my church’s streaming app!)

Since Plex, without regard to its paying customers, does not maintain multiple iOS, nor tvOS app versions in Apple’s app stores (something easy to do), users can’t revert back to previous versions in order to isolate Plex-system bugs to client vs server versions.

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The iOS Plex App cannot play downloaded music without a lof of delay to first look for an internet connection. Then once you play downloaded music the app pauses and never plays. This defeats the purpose of downloading content to have an all time music player based on Plex. Is it possible to disconnect the Plex App from having to rely on a web connection to work properly?

I also have the Plexamp App but everything is done to make having all my music library on my device very complicated if not impossible. Please remove the 24 hour per library limit on Plexamp. I can’t create 30 playlists per artist or genre just to avoid reaching 24 hour of music per library. I rely on Plex and my own files precisely to avoid the effects of using a streaming service.

Or at least allow bulk download from Plex in my browser so I can download all my music and manually load it to my iPhone. Why make it so difficult?? I can’t download 5,000 songs one by one.

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