Let’s Talk About What’s Happening "The PLEX experience"

Plex Players Mobile Devices
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Server Version#: 1.41.7.9749
Player Version#: whatever this UIx disaster just got released.

Before we start:

This is intended to be blunt and unapologetic. It will contain useful information - but ya’ll earned this one. If a company is going to pivot to inserting itself between you and your media so it can sell you something you aren’t looking for - and then demand “more” - they damn well better make sure they are providing improved services… and I have to say this was as spectacular a launch as the challenger shuttle’s was.

Over the course of as many years as I remember willingly paying the month to month subscription (because a dev gets it - we got bills to pay and the one off lifetime was probably ill advised) Plex has effectively had a simple premise: connect you to your shared media. This is the CORE function of the app ever since it was ported from XBMC. It provided a unified - clean - reasonably unobtrusive way to access and sort your media. This was good - mainly because this is basic design principles:

Conveyance? Mostly, yes.
Easy to navigate? No complaints.
Did what it said on the tin? Heres your video and music - in as few clicks as possible. Seems about right.

So…

Let’s Talk About What’s Happening

Where to start. Much like I suggested with the challenger shuttle reference - this is a disaster. A mess. A completely avoidable, disastrous, mess.

  • We can see less on the screen of what we are looking for.
  • Features are missing.
  • How in gods green earth has video playback, a core component, a stuttery flawed mess? It literally works in any browser better than the native app. How did that make it past testing?!
  • Subtitles, working previously, invisible. Web player? works. Prior app? works. Again - how did this pass QA?
  • Video playback. Core component. Stuttery, incomprehensibly bad playback locally. Best possible shot at working. Prior versions? working as expected. Web player? yep. normal. Did you replace not only the UI but the core functions / player? Thats… ambitious… and went about as one would expect. But regression is… neat?

Additionally: I know you REALLY want to sell me on whatever you can mine from streaming services… but how is it GOOD UIx design to have a watchlist… (and I know you know where this is going) … needing EXTRA clicks through and a slight wait while you “look for sources” when it was bookmarked ON a media source which was provided. Exercise some common sense. How that feature has gotten worse is beyond me. It should be a time saver not an extra 2 steps.

What You Should Be Working On

  • Bugfixes: agreed. yet here we are. see aforementioned repeat “how did this pass QA” statements.
  • Features that are consistent? Maybe don’t try to emulate google’s worst aspects like the feature graveyard you seem to be developing.
  • Hot take: improving resource usage and possibly refining working features… By most metrics tested plex just doesn’t transcode terribly efficiently and is spectacularly bad in some categories.

What You Shouldn’t Be Working On

  • Finding new creative ways to get between users and their media.
  • Finding Facebook-esque ways of ramming unwanted, unasked for, “features” which worsen the user experience but creatively “monetize” the user.

Shill what you want outside the app, have it be OPT IN, whatever. The number of times I have to now waste time assisting family members who had 0 issues PRIOR to say… 2019 (goodness what happened then I wonder..?) and now are constantly stumbling into confusing places is infuriating.

What’s New Today?

Wasting time looking up how to roll back an app and directing those who (why in the hell is this paywalled after this disaster?!) aren’t pass users to alternative APK sites.

  • Accessibility improvements […] - here’s a novel concept: on first run ask if your user needs BIG ICONS or CANT SEE because as best I can tell this is a fancy way of saying “we.. scaled everything up more so you can see less!” … unless we need to simply assume none of us can see or have fine motor issues. But then the player would actually need to work for this to be a legitimate improvement…
  • OTA playback improvements: coulda fooled me. As far as my testing went… awful local - worse mobile. Based on those play store reviews: seems I’m not alone. Who pushed this?
  • Browsing library made easier: tap the burger, oh look its my media. By category, as configured. Watchlist … we covered (its bad and you should feel bad about making it worse)

If you use “Plex too” someone, somewhere, in that ~100 or so employees surely must have noticed something wrong with this release… or for that matter maybe with some of the other behaviors I mentioned above. If not - call me concerned. If I pushed something this poorly developed, bug ridden, lacking key features… boy howdy I’d be rolling back and burning some midnight oil on the internal testing until I was DAMN sure it actually worked.

Nobody was pressuring you to hit this “milestone” - we all weren’t clamoring for a new, less usable, less stable experience. We opened the app to listen to our music, watch our shows, and just for a moment remove ourselves from our daily grind. And here we are. Genuinely: what the hell happened? I get the sense that somewhere you got disconnected from your user base and it REALLY is starting to show.

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I’m not sure you’ve seen the thousands of other posts complaining about the same things. You could’ve just copied those posts and saved yourself some time.

Someone from high up pushed the release of an unfinished app. The end.

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I saw them. There should be more. This should be front and center until they roll it back. Its asinine that it hasn’t been done yet. Its easy enough to ignore a consolidated thread - and trust me they do - maliciously or not.

If I were a dev logging into a sea of “what in the actual f*ck did you people do” … I’d be more than compelled to rethink that push. Single thread - it’d get a read… but the urgency would be lower.

That person should be refreshing their resume right about now.

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Generally speaking; I am exhausted from apps/software/user experiences continually requiring more clicks to get the same tasks done. I guess that’s part of the ongoing enshitification.

The only thing the Plex mobile app needed to fix was the downloads. It’s the ONLY reason many of us are on Plex, and it’s still a steaming pile.

EDIT: In addition, there’s a product manager or product director somewhere that needs to be looking for a new job. Hopefully not for the company I work for. :laughing:

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That’s just it. They utterly ignore common requests and basic bugfixes in favor of chasing the high of making something new. It’s a real problem that’s only gotten worse. Someone needs to slap a dev or two and say: “Welcome to software development. Go fix the problems before the technical debt kills us all.”

Who cares about a new coat of paint on a sinking ship? Honestly.

I’ve seen too many of these “milestone twats” that are just looking for some LinkedIn or resume cred by doing something that can be a bullet point. Meanwhile the code is imploding and they are leaving disasters in their wake. Genuine enshitification.

This whole thing (and frankly the last almost 10 years) have been a steady decline since they started chasing that monetization dragon. The whole executive suite should have been sacked over this. It’s embarrassing.

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You don’t think moving to a common codebase across all the various platforms might have a benefit to development and bugfixing?

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“…Not like this”

That’s a difficult question to answer outright. Merged codebases require less effort to maintain - sure. Theres a lot of “buts” and “ifs,” however. A hard switch to new code is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You are effectively tossing away stability and any prior work / knowledge of the code for a completely new environment loaded with unknowns.

A dev can go from “knowing” roughly where something is imploding to being utterly lost very quickly when trying to resolve bugs in new code.

Mix in a completely new UI and you cannot even fathom the difficulty of trying to determine where something is breaking.

I cannot think of a single developer in all of my years of my many fields I’ve occupied that would do something this spectacularly stupid. I’ve known some that would just simply verify: “you’re positive you want this pushed?” … and then after confirmation would head for the door.

Know that Ghostbusters scene “Don’t shut it off. I’m warning you.”

That would (and should have been) the devs.

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I’m sure you’re not, but it does sound like you’re suggesting they should’ve just continued as it was, despite that obviously having issues with development (as you previously noted the implementation of requested features or bugfixes could be problematic).

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Again, a complicated thing to answer. The short answer which may not be popular is “yes” but requires a longer answer.

You can stage a merge. I’m oversimplifying here for the sake of conversation but: Slowly move one part of the existing code to accept or be compatible with the target destination. Cut that over and move onto the next part.

This lets you focus resources and debugging on one part of the move at a time. You shouldn’t be rugging your devs. This shouldn’t be a fast process. It’s methodical.

Consider the current situation: there were known issues with the prior codebase. Surely. But by-and-large it worked and if you were to say… poll the majority of users they’d be “indifferent” to satisfied as an average. This is reflected in the overall store ratings over time etc. Repeat the same poll now. You don’t want to shock your user base. Especially with a bad switch on top of the change. There are zero boiled frogs here.

Without rehashing my prior post- this wasn’t a race nor was there a release date that needed to be hit. And let’s use a current example: GTA 6. “This isn’t ready yet. We don’t want to let you down- we’ll ship once it’s ready.” …And that was with an expected release date. THAT is how you handle a missed deadline. Compare that to … this.

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PLEASE - just globally replace this release with the prior app that works just fine. This one sucks, and it’s been a month with no improvement!!!

Just get back to the old version - PLEASE!!!

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Bring back the old app.
Meanwhile use the App Store to voice your opinion about the new app as well.

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Absolutely this. Make a mess and be loud.

Someone, somewhere in their organization thought they could at best: make this ill advised decision and just let it blow over… or more likely: use their entire user base as unpaid alpha testers while collecting money. Now I don’t want to don the tin foil but: if that person were truly insidious they’d expect people to fall off their month to month passes in response which just opens up their viewers to more monetization shake downs in the future. I very much dislike the timing and the response and hate that this is a possibility.

Regardless of the speculation, though, the userbase absolutely should be demanding a change and heads on pikes. They are collecting money for this. If they were publicly traded - make no mistake that this would have lawyers at their doors.

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Completely broken. iOS and Android, too.

Loading of DVR channels from Asustor: a disaster. It loads, and loads, and loads.

But no channels were load. iOS and Android, equal which Vetsion or device. The same.

Complete destroied the app.

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Plex should put the old app back in the IOS store, even if its under an alternative name.
like plex legacy. But they probably won’t even l listen or reply on all of our posts.

The fact is that they are decision driven. Not result driven. Everyone is screaming fire and they act if their nose is bleeding.

As the application is right now, it no longer functions. It is unusable.

Its nice that the dev wants a smaller footprint for the application but it is clearly one massive big failure.

How can you be so naive that you turn your back on the complete IOS user base.
Not every update is an improvement. And this was no update but a downgrade.

From working software to a piece of useless code.

Bring back the old app. What you offering right now is not worth money. Its not working. I have dozens of issues, and as paying customer, i do not like to be used as Alpha tester.

This is alpha software and even for apha versions, its an unstable one.

Plex put your pride aside and choose for your paying customers who want to use the software they payed for. Not the piece of crap that is in the app store right now.

My advice would be for everyone to cancel their plex subscriptions as why would you pay to test software? As the software is not working, you are now actually paying to be a tester.

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What are you 5 years old? Plex devs won’t (and shouldn’t) take you serious if that’s the way you want to communicate your issues to them.

Completely false and fake narrative. Video playback works fine and the app is overall stable. Haven’t experienced one crash yet on iOS. What it is missing is features that make it feel more polished of an app. However all the basic functions work (navigating your library and playing back your media).

All you people are gonna do is make Plex ignore all of you (and I don’t blame them) because if they can’t trust you to give honest feedback they aren’t gonna bother interacting with you about the app. Screaming for employees to be fired and lose jobs and risk homelessness or the ability to pay bills?

For f***s sake the amount of people who lack basic human decency these days is alarming.

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Sure the rhetoric probably isn’t going to help here.

But by the same token, telling a bunch of people who have observed issues with the app that their issues don’t exist is just gaslighting and is not decent either.

Basic video playback works, I can’t comment about features that existed before vs. now. However live tv is completely broken for iOS and iPadOS with this update.

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try to do remote streaming. It fails continuesly.

We as paying customers have a right to complain. They wrecked something that was completely functional. Plex igonres normal feedback and beta feedback.

For me it has been 1 big disaster. If complaining leads to ignoring your clients, Plex will go bankrupt in no time.

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Uh yeah, cuz in the REAL world that’s actually how the rest of the customer facing industries work. There’s a thing called a threshold. A limit of what customers are willing to put up with. You know, like when McDonalds customers repeatedly get their orders wrong, they expect a set of policy standards that kick in to gear that often allow the management to correct the problem, either retrain the employee(s) or let them go for x amount of repeated offenses.

Yes, heads should roll for this.

Customer rapport refers to the positive connection and relationship built between a business and its customers, characterized by mutual understanding, trust, and open communication. It’s about establishing a strong bond that fosters loyalty, satisfaction, and positive word-of-mouth.

OUR WORD OF MOUTH sold Plex to others and all Plex Inc. had to do was do what they did best. Not to go down rivers and lakes they weren’t use to.

Here’s a more detailed look at customer rapport:

What it is:

It’s more than just a transaction; it’s about building a positive and lasting connection.

Both the business and the customer are on the same page, understanding each other’s needs and perspectives.

Customers trust the business and believe that they can rely on them.

Effective communication channels are established to facilitate open and honest dialogue.

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Definitely not saying that but are people here not gaslighting the devs? Telling them the app is terrible horrible 100% unusable and so many other hyperbolic comments?

I don’t use live tv so can’t comment on that, but that is helpful and useful criticism of the app and something the devs themselves can go test and work to fix. What you demonstrate is the right way to communicate your issues and I’m 100% for that.

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Do YOU have a bug tracker? Do YOU singularly have access to this privy information that we don’t know about that states what problems are resolved? Then I don’t think these comments can be categorized as hyperbolic until we all have PROOF that there is evidence of these bugs and other UI elements being fixed.

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