New Interface Not Ready

Plex Players
1

I always try to be someone who offers constructive criticism, so here’s mine for the new Android TV version that was pushed out to my Shield last night after about an hour of using it.

  • There’s about a half-second delay between pressing the button on the remote and the corresponding action on screen that didn’t exist in the previous client version
  • Core functionality such as next/previous episode in a TV series is wholly absent
  • Having any kind of music play by default is always a bad idea
  • Can’t change the stylized logos for show/movie names
  • The option to tell if a video is direct playing is wholly absent
  • The forward seek gets stuck and carries over even into a new episode

This UI seems to be designed to look good in screenshots but when it comes to usability I have to wonder if any of the devs are actually using it beyond just testing whatever random function they’re working on at the moment.

Just because Apple/Google/Microsoft/whoever decides to do something stupid UI wise it doesn’t mean you guys have to copy them. Especially if it makes no sense for your particular app. This minimalist UI nonsense has been taken beyond the extreme. Pruning a few duplicate or rarely used functions is one thing, removing core functionality like next/previous episode is something else entirely.

At best I would call this current version an early beta. I could adjust to the new look of icons and whatnot, but the overall lack of optimization and missing core functionality are just simply inexcusable in a version being pushed out to the masses. I can only hope someone pushed the wrong button somewhere and this change will be reverted until the new app has had more time to bake.

Edit: For those in a similar situation you can get the last version without all the core functionality loss by using APKMirror. You want version 10.30.8.4222 that was released back in January of 2026. Unfortunately this requires installing APKMirror’s stupid app to install their “bundle” APK and then also turning off auto updates in the Play Store which will mean you have to manually update all your other apps from now on, but at least you have a working Plex client again.

Personally, I’m in the process of migrating to Jellyfin, and I suppose if that doesn’t work there’s always PlexKodiConnect or PM4K. No point in speculating on why Plex has seemingly gone out of its way to abandon its core userbase, the result is the same and there’s nothing I can do about it except seek greener pastures.

It’s not me Plex, it’s you.

2

Unfortunately they started pushing this beta version out nearly two years ago to other platforms and yet, it’s still somehow extremely beta.

3

Same scenario . New version of the UI got pushed to my shield yesterday and I have same issues. Why would you just push an update. Is there a way foe me to revert back to the old interface?

4

Here’s a link to an APK “bundle” for the previous version from the Play Store: 10.30.8.4222 You unfortunately will have to install APKMirror’s stupid app to install it, and then disable auto updates from the Play Store, but it gets you a non-lobotomized version.

Personally, I’d only use it as a stopgap measure until you can get everything set up on Jellyfin or Emby. There’s nothing in Plex’s actions over the past couple of years to suggest that they’re going to suddenly start reversing course on a lot of their more questionable decisions, so may as well rip the band-aid off now and get it over with.

5

Thank you for your help. I’m with you. Jellyfin is an easy install with no problems. Backing into an older APK could introduce more/other issues so it really boils down to suck it up and adapt to plex’s whims / changes or go to Jellyfin. There is a reason why I didn’t go the Plex Pass route and this is it. I can run them both at the same time too until I decide!

6

Here’s my list of problems after using the new app for 30 minutes in case Plex cares (which obviously they don’t). I’ll be rolling back to the previous version since these issues make the app unusable.

  • Option to start a currently recording LiveTV episode from the beginning is broken/non-existent.
  • When you do start an in-progress recording, the scrub bar shows the episode ‘exists’ before your current position but you cannot scan back further than the place the episode started.
  • Pressed button once to skip back 10 seconds but it got stuck and continued skipping until it reached the beginning of the episode. No other button presses could stop it.
  • The option to delete an episode is now an additional unnecessary layer deep. Delete should be a primary option/icon under the episode, not in more options, and certainly not buried in more options > manage.
  • While skipping 30 sec. forward scrub bar incorrectly shows more program than is available. Instead of just playing the current end/live position of the program, the spinning icon shows for ~20 seconds waiting for the missing program to catch up.
  • Moving forward through guide is painfully slow. Button presses are delayed before moving view point in guide. Did anyone at Plex try moving forward a week, for instance, to see the user experience? It makes the 14 day guide unusable for anything other than looking a couple hours in the future.
  • Live TV guide recording icon is white and therefore disappears when that program is highlighted (also in white).
  • Going to the LiveTV DVR schedule should move to the current day/time and not two weeks previous requiring moving through all the previous recordings list by pressing and holding the scroll button for 20+ seconds.
  • Live TV Recording Priority list icons are too big and require too much scrolling for a long list. There is also no longer a way to delete scheduled recordings from this list. There is still no sort feature for this list (alphabetical, for example).
  • Need option to remove the “On Plex” items such as Live TV, On Demand, and Discover from the sidebar.
  • If Plex is going to show a mini sidebar full of icons, then when you move left the actual menu should grow out of the mini sidebar graphic rather than slide out from edge. Right now it looks like a set of icons you can never reach or highlight.
  • “Season” card at the beginning of the list of episodes is unnecessary and just looks confusingly like another episode.
7

I agree with all of the posts here. I would have thought that Plex might have learned a lesson about pushing out updates that are full of problems for it’s users.

  • I also found that I could not see captions on DVR recordings
  • When I skipped forward, thumbnails did not show up 1 frame at a time.
  • When looking at the DVR Schedule, it starts with several past days showing instead of the previous and current day, which requires scrolling through a lot of history before getting to the relevant data.
  • When fast forwarding, kept getting the spinning wheel, which didn’t occur with the previous version.

All in all, a big blunder on Plex’s team.

8

What an absolute terrible user experience.

Does anyone know where the network settings have moved to? I’d like to verify which Network Plex has connected to.

The black column which contains the list of library files, seems to have lost some of its functionality, where did the three dots go that were next to the library names?

Why is that column floating a couple of inches off the side of the screen and the same from the top and the bottom, compressing the text to near unreadable levels.

Way to many other issues to list.

Do better Plex.

9

Edit: For those in a similar situation you can get the last version without all the core functionality loss by using APKMirror. You want version 10.30.8.4222 that was released back in January of 2026

Thanks for this. Downloading now.

I have been avoiding ‘The New Experience’ on my Android phone since they started rolling it out, and today I just got this new update on my Xiaomi Box, and it is horrible. It might look nice and all, but it’s slow every click takes a second to respond settings have been moved around and are not as detailed as before, and most importantly, it will not allow me to direct play almost anything for some reason, when it used to work fine before this new experience.

At some point they will require us to use this new app; until then, I will go back to the old one, and when that time arrives, I will find an alternative to Plex

10

“The option to tell if a video is direct playing is wholly absent”

It’s now in Stats-for-Nerds. Note that content that used to be direct play is now transcoded. My x265 with DTS-HT MA audio is now transcoded where it used to be direct play. There’s probably other cases that also now force transcoding where direct play used to work. I’ve switched to the Plezy app for Google TV (on my Nvidia Shield). This restores direct play.

11

Guys, I put this together with ChatGPT. I did the roll-back myself on my Nvidia Shield running Android and it worked perfectly. Hope this helps everyone.

WORKING ROLLBACK: Restore the Classic Plex Android TV Interface Without Uninstalling First

Like many other Plex users, I was extremely unhappy with the new Android TV interface. I lost familiar navigation controls, including the previous/next-video buttons, and experienced a frustratingly redesigned interface.

I successfully rolled back my NVIDIA Shield to Plex for Android TV 10.30.8.4222, restoring the older interface I prefer.

The important part: I successfully attempted an in-place downgrade before uninstalling the current Plex app. It worked on my Shield, and I did not have to uninstall first.

My setup

  • Device: NVIDIA Shield
  • Android version: 11
  • Current version before rollback: 2026.19.1
  • Older version installed: 10.30.8.4222
  • Package: com.plexapp.android
  • Computer: Windows 10
  • Connection: ADB over the home network

Tools used

  1. Android SDK Platform-Tools (ADB) — to connect to the Shield and install the APK files.
  2. Windows Command Prompt and built-in tar — to extract the APKM bundle.
  3. APKMirror — to download the older Plex Android TV bundle.

Older-version download page:

I verified the downloaded bundle’s SHA-256 checksum before proceeding.

Step 1: Connect to the Shield

Enable Developer options and network debugging on the Shield. Find its IP address, then open Command Prompt in your Platform-Tools folder.

Check the connection:

adb devices

My Shield appeared as:

192.168.1.252:5555    device

Use your own Shield’s IP address if it differs.

Step 2: Extract the downloaded APKM bundle

Create a working directory:

mkdir plex_rollback

Extract the bundle (replace the filename if yours differs):

tar -xf "com.plexapp.android_10.30.8.4222-971048929_2arch_1dpi_25lang_32b9af6a880141fc70255071aab0d54f.apkm" -C plex_rollback

The extracted bundle included base.apk, the ARM64 split, language splits and the screen-density split.

Step 3: Attempt the in-place downgrade

Do not uninstall the existing Plex app first if you want to try preserving its app data.

For my Shield, this command succeeded:

adb -s 192.168.1.252:5555 install-multiple -r -d "plex_rollback\base.apk" "plex_rollback\split_config.arm64_v8a.apk" "plex_rollback\split_config.xhdpi.apk" "plex_rollback\split_config.en.apk"

The command returned:

Success

The -r option requests replacing the existing app, and -d requests a downgrade. Android may reject downgrades depending on the app and system restrictions, so this is not guaranteed to work on every device.

Step 4: Verify the installed version

Run:

adb -s 192.168.1.252:5555 shell dumpsys package com.plexapp.android | findstr "versionName versionCode"

My result:

versionCode=971048929 minSdk=23 targetSdk=35
versionName=10.30.8.4222

I then opened Plex on the Shield and confirmed that the classic interface was restored.

Important cautions

  • Do not clear app data.
  • Do not uninstall first if you want to attempt the in-place method.
  • The signing certificate and compatibility must match; a different device or bundle may produce a failure.
  • If installation fails, stop and inspect the exact error before doing anything destructive.
  • Older versions may have security or compatibility issues.
  • Disable automatic updates for Plex if you want to avoid being moved back to the newer version.

This was a successful workaround on my NVIDIA Shield, not an official Plex-supported rollback procedure.

My request to Plex Dev Team: Please restore the missing playback navigation controls and give users a choice between the classic and redesigned interfaces. A redesigned interface should not force long-time customers to lose familiar functionality.

12

Please don’t use AI to write these requests for you.

13

My main complaints:

  • Library scanning is hidden deeper in the menus for some reason
  • Metadata changes are not automatically updated anymore. You now have to navigate off a title then back on to it to see the updates. This breaks core features of an integration I use and I wish Plex would stop changing things to be worse.
14

I got the new interface yesterday. It looked nice at first, but I found most of the bugs people already mentioned very soon. Here are two more bugs I found on my system:

  1. The forward and backward jump in the video is performed twice. The video jumps correctly at first, then the progress bar is shown and then a jumps again. Only when the bar was already visible, it jumps only once.
  2. When I’m in the video info screen and then click on an actor, then click back, it jumps to the side menu and not back to the info screen.

Just 2 annoying bugs I never had with the old version. And I only took a quick look.

15

I got the new interface a few days ago and I’m not even remotely satisfied with what Plex has delivered here.

Is this a beta?

The new interface is extremely slow, and the settings have been hidden away in hard-to-reach submenus. Why?

Why has everything become so large? Is this meant for the visually impaired? On my 77" TV, some images are bigger than a newspaper. In exchange, all other information has disappeared.

How do I set the app so that it always starts on the dashboard?

16

Disaster of a UI. Why, as a lifetime paid subscriber, must I see ‘Recommendations’ versus ‘Browse’? Anyone know how to revert to old UI?

17

With the PLEX NE it seems that on one of my Harmony Elite with Flirc usb (Nvidia shield pro) now the ok/select button won’t work. Possibly something got re-mapped.

18

In the app, navigate to Settings → Experience and set the default library view to “Browse.”

This should always land you in the browsing view when selecting a library.

19

Why do you have to force a new UI on us. Let us choose which one we want!!! That would be resolve all of this.

21

After years of the interface being the same you’ve made baffling changes to the Plex app on Android streaming players.

When I try to pick up a show where I left off from the continue watching section the interface feels much lower and laggier as I navigate to the episode. Sometimes when I try to resume an episode and click on it instead of the focus being on the episode so i can just click 1 more time to start playing it’s on the description above the episode.

And now when a show starts and you want to skip the intro (if you missed the initial prompt) instead of pressing the down, right, enter it’s now down, up, up, enter. A different combination with an additional button press.

The worst is trying to shuffle an entire series of a show. Before it was long press, click down a couple times, go to show, then you would press right about three times hit enter and the menu would be on “shuffle show” or randomly on some series there’s a “share” button above “shuffle show” and you have to click once down to put the focus on the shuffle series option (why is that btw?).

Already that was a frustratingly long amount of navigation just to shuffle show but now it’s been made worse with the addition of a bunch of extra navigation to get to the “shuffle the show” option. Why is it so difficult for us to do this? Shuffling a series should be easy but now it’s even worse. What problems were you solving with this design change?