I will downgrade to the old android app now. Too many bugs in the new app makes it unusable for me:
always timeout error message
phone display and playback is on all night long and drains my battery
the settings while playing video is always jumping outside of display and I have to swipe it up again and again
the last entry of my library list is covered and isn’t visible
Who decided to release this garbage to public? If I can’t use the old app anymore and these issues don’t get fixed I will quit plex and switch to jellyfin or something else. This is a no go!
What in the holy hell is this release? A disaster UI. A disaster UE. Why are we dealing with a beta release? As a PLEX PASS user, this is infuriating. Customization out the door and for WHAT? So we can have ad-loaded PLEX content dangled in front of us? I’m using PLEX to watch MY content from MY server. I should NOT have to click 3-4-5 clicks to get to watch MY content.
Not even a NOTIFICATION to the PLEX PASS users about this abomination release? The lack of professionalism from PLEX PR is astounding.
PLEX Corporate has clearly abandoned its user base. My family and friends who have supported this app are already searching for alternate platforms.
At this point with the new app still not working, basically seems like a rollback is really the only solution until they get the dumpster fire put out and slap a new coat of paint on it.
What an absolute clusterfuck of strategy. This release is just a symptom of bad management. Software wise, PR wise, Revenue wise. Scott Olechowski must be mad, how did this happen?
On iPad the scrolling bar does not work at all in offline mode, when watching downloaded stuff, and the videos always start from the beginning, total pain in the butt when you want to continue watching a video you started already, first you have to remember where you were, and second you can’t scroll there, you have to press a gazillion times the forward button. A non working scrolling bar in a video player is amateur hour.
I would suggest (and I may be wrong) that Plex are not using the standard IOS or Android video renderer, rather using a cross platform option which doesn’t work aywhere near as well on either device.
My experience as a Lifetime plex license holder with a android environment:
Plex movies/live tv: still worth it, new app is a bit more responsive. Plex Music: not using. Audiobooks are handled by “Listen audiobook player” which can interface with Plex server for easy downloads. Plex photos: I deleted the plex Photo library and installed immich. Much better performance and features (machine learning facial recognition and search is very nice), also most important: wife approved!
As the enshittification appears to continue, I already started archiving some Plex server/app versions. When the Plex sunset happens, I will have a buffer while transitioning to a server/client environment more dedicated to own media needs.
Ever since the rollout of the “New Experience” I immediately lost the ability to use plex via the web browser, and instead get an error whenever I try to play anything (I’ve tried Firefox and Chrome on Windows, as well as Safari on iOS). Their was a short period of time in which I got it to work following the release of the New Experience updates for a short period of time after running Chuck’s DBRepair script, but think this only lasted for about a day.
You’re getting time out errors? I sometimes get them, but usually (maybe I don’t wait long enough - several minutes?) but my results just stay blank.
This happens for Live TV Guide listings, searches and while opening a video’s details page.
My Libraries are all too large to ever reach the last entry so I can’t comment on experiencing this issue.
If this is the same thing I experience, I rotate the screen to portrait and I can better see the setting options - but yeah, one of the many quirks that still need to be addressed.
I deleted my photos library from my ones server as well as my mother’s server.
The features were too limited and even after re, re and re-organizing our photo collections the Plex UI really didn’t work for us.
With specific regards to your 3rd party alternatives, I personally have gone through retraining my facial recognition 4+ times because of standards/changes I think Microsoft changed 3 times and none had the function to migrate user facial data.
I did this for Google and Adobe, but abandoned them for various reasons.
I didn’t think I will ever go through this effort again and if I do, it will be worth one provider/service that has an open API so multiple apps and services could share the same facial data.
Off Plex chooses to stay in this market, they have to dig in, add real value and features and support third party facial and other available data to avoid redundancy.
Have been using the 2025.18.0 update on iOS. I only have a couple of major issues that still stick around.
Playback still restarts whenever a network change occurs, but I saw the changelog stated that this was resolved(?) in this update. I did notice it is a little more resilient, but moving from cellular to wifi triggers it easily (playing a downloaded show in the subway is a guaranteed way to get playback to restart 5-10 times in 30 seconds). As others have mentioned, airplane mode works around this, but is very annoying to use every time.
Subtitles still don’t work in PiP.
I did notice that the battery life is better on this version, my phone is no longer heating up as much.
In my experience it is even worse, the video streams start again from the beginning with any network hiccup. This is extremely annoying while remote streaming. And considering that Remote Streaming is now a premium paid feature this is ridiculous.
Agreed. Sometimes, just roaming between Access Points will cause playback to restart. There definitely needs to be another look at the playback interruptions.
