I contacted them and got fobbed off with “we have had it in beta for a while”. There appears to be very little concern for the large amount of poor feedback.
7 Likes
It was but also a very small subset of users were beta testing and most of us gave the same feedback they’re seeing today. I still say this is all investor driven change which is why they are refusing to roll back. More so than usual.
10 Likes
To be fair… The last time we had a major UI issue, it took them a bit to make the decision to correct course. We got a temporary version of the app, and they developed an all new one to replace the “oops” they’d previously dished out.
If change comes, it will come slow. There’s likely going to be a series of meetings with talking heads in board rooms questioning what went wrong, and what to do about it, first.
3 Likes
Intercap and Kleiner Perkins as Plex investors
-
Long-term backers: The venture capital firms have a history of investing in Plex. Kleiner Perkins invested in Plex’s Series B round in 2014, and both firms were mentioned as key investors in a 2021 Series C funding round.
-
Focused on growth: In the 2021 funding round, Plex stated that the new capital would be used to invest in its engineering, product, and content teams to scale its free, ad-supported video business. This indicates that the investors were interested in the company’s growth and monetization strategy, which relies on product updates.
User backlash against the Plex redesign
Recent redesigns and product changes have faced criticism from the Plex user community, particularly from users who preferred the service’s original design focused on local media management.
-
The 2024 “Future of Plex” update: A blog post in September 2024 announced major changes aimed at “streamlining” the app by separating music and photos into companion apps. The post stated the changes would make the Plex app “faster, more responsive, and easier to use”.
-
The 2025 “Remote Watch Pass”: In March 2025, Plex announced a new subscription option, which also appears to have drawn some user complaints on Reddit.
-
Community frustration: User forums like Reddit have threads titled “The plex redesign nearly endend my family,” where users complain about the negative effects of the redesign on their home media setups.
Investors’ role versus company direction
While it is reasonable to assume that investors like Intercap and Kleiner Perkins would support strategic changes that aim to increase revenue and grow the business, they are not typically involved in the day-to-day product design decisions. Plex is responsible for executing its product roadmap and has been vocal about its strategic shift toward becoming a broader streaming platform.
In short, the investors’ backing likely funded the expansion that led to the redesign, but the community’s frustration with the new user experience is directed at Plex, not its financiers.
4 Likes
100% agree, this is bad. Hopefully Plex will address the issue.
4 Likes
I contacted Plex support to raise my concerns over the new UI. There was no option to contact tech support, so I had to use billing support. There response is shown below.
Tommy (Plex, Inc.)
Sep 22, 2025, 2:03 PM PDT
Well, you contacted accounting and billing team
We are not tech people
That is handled in our forums, where our PM’s also monitor
Sep 22, 2025, 11:52 AM PDT
Hi
Thanks for your message.
A preview version of the software doesn’t help me. I want to watch TV easily, not look at upcoming Plex updates to see if I like them. Previous updates have generally been welcomed, as they iteratively improve the product, not make it less usable.
I’ve posted on the forums, and they are full of people complaining. 2 posts suggest emailing Plex directly, which I’ve done.
Thanks
Andrew Chambers
On 22 Sep 2025, at 11:03, Plex Billing plexpass-at-plex.tv wrote:
Tommy (Plex, Inc.)
Sep 22, 2025, 3:03 AM PDT
Hello Andrew
We previously released a preview version of our new app experience on Roku back in May. Over the past several months, we’ve been gathering feedback from users and making improvements. That new app experience is now being released to all Roku users.
If you’d like to leave constructive feedback about the new app experience, we encourage you to post specific details in our forums (https://forums.plex.tv/tags/c/plex-players/streaming-devices/29/roku).
3 Likes
Wow. Out of 447 comments, it’s hard to find much positive feedback. That alone should clue Plex into how users really feel.
I’m adding my voice to the pile. I’ve had a lifetime Plex Pass for over a decade, and until now the interface has always been easy and intuitive. This latest update ruined that and turned Plex into a hot pile of garbage.
What made Plex stand out was its reliability and simplicity, especially compared to other streaming platforms constantly “streamlining” their UIs. Now Plex looks and functions like every other bloated mess out there.
Where to start? I’ll just echo what many others have already said:
-
Why am I forced to have Discover and Live TV in the top menu bar? I’ve never used them and never will.
-
Recently watched items are now buried in sub-menus. Why?
-
The pause/FF/RWD controls spontaneously stop working. The only fix? Go back to the Roku home screen, select the Plex app, press “*” on the remote, and restart the app. Seriously, WTF?
-
Removing the ability to fully customize the interface is a huge loss of functionality.
-
If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.
-
If this was some marketing play to squeeze money out of users, it’s not going to work.
-
Adding “Season X” in front of every TV season is completely useless.
From what I’ve read, Plex has no intention of restoring the features that built its devoted user base. They admit people hate the update, but are dangling promises of “quite a few updates” down the road. What’s next? Forced ads before I can watch my own media?
5 Likes
Another bug I noticed. Now whenever I am watching a video in my Home Movies Library for some reason before the content loads it is showing me a background image from one of my TV Shows from my TV Shows library.
Plex you’ve done a bang up job on this update! Loading an image from something in a completely differently library is a major screw up! And get rid of the stupid season tile before episode one in every single season! It’s useless and irritating.
Now instead of being brought to the next unwatched episode in the season I am always brought to this stupid tile I will never use and have to manually scroll over to find the next unwatched episode instead. More clicks to get to what I want! Just like the ‘New & Improved’ vertical top menu bar which takes many more clicks to get to my libraries.
I would love to know what was going through the minds of the people at Plex who pitched these changes and what their reasoning was. The only thing I can come up with is to deliberately tick off the customers because these changes serve absolutely no other purpose.
Bugs have been created and functionality has been lost, Plex broke what didn’t need to be fixed and they have the complete arrogance to say they won’t revert to the previous version. Not only that but they won’t even give us back the old version as a rebranded Plex Classic app. They literally are getting off on forcing us to use this terrible new design when they don’t have to.
I am so glad I never bought a Plex Pass and never gave the clueless people in charge any of my money. They should all be fired and never hired to work in software again!
2 Likes
It seems we are stuck with this.
Bring back the “Continue Watching” feature. When I boot this app, it just comes up with what I recently posted on the server NOT what I’m actually watching, I have to move around to figure out what I want to continue watching. This is NOT convenient at all. Please fix this. I need the simplicity of the ROKU.
3 Likes
That’s pretty much the response I got too.
3 Likes
I just wanted to add my total disappoint with this new UI on Roku. I’ve been a Plex user for a long time and a paid user. To me the entire new UI was developed to compete with other streaming platforms (which makes sense). Unfortunately the designers of this complete abomination forget to take into account that many people that use Plex could care less about more streaming services and just want to stream their own content. It has become so difficult that I have no idea why anyone would even want to use this nightmare. I never had a problem paying for the service but there is no way I would pay for this crap.
I spent part of today getting Emby setup and it was very easy (which Plex has never been).
To the marketing team at Plex if your goal was to get me to spend more money, it had the opposite effect.
Goodbye Plex.
5 Likes
It wasn’t removed. You’re experiencing a bug of some sort.
THREE issues** I’m not seeing in this very long forum post:
-
On a Samsung TV, running a Roku Ultra device, with the newly updated Plex app, I can no longer Filter my Watchlist by Genre. I have over 400 Movies in my Watchlist, and I usually choose my viewing based on what genre I am in the mood for that evening. I’m still able to Filter my Watchlist by Genre in a web browser on a computer, but I never watch TV on the computer. Are you aware of this bug?
-
For some Movies, NO Critic reviews (or Plex user reviews) are displaying at all, even when a Rotten Tomatoes score is visible with the movie description. A rotating “thinking” icon appears briefly and then the usual rows of “More from…”. It’s normal for no Critic reviews to appear if the Rotten Tomatoes score is absent at the top, but there would usually be at least some Plex user reviews. The entire “Reviews” row simply does not display after the “thinking” rotating icon disappears…
-
The following is a minor bug, but frustrating nonetheless: When reading a Plex user’s review for a film or TV show, if the text is longer than the allotted size for the display box, selecting the “expand” icon in the upper right corner takes you to a blank screen with just the title—none of the reviewer’s content is visible (when it used to display the entire review). I’ve tested this for multiple reviews in many different Movies and TV shows. Again, in a web browser on a computer, different experience: the entire review is visible in one large text area.
Thanks for reading.
1 Like
I suspect folks uninstalling the app will get attention faster than grumbling in a peer-support forum.
I mean, the bean counters love their metrics. Bad metrics and market-share loss = results of bad decisions to most senior management I’ve ever worked with.
I’ve already moved on to one of the many alternatives and will be purging in a couple weeks when it becomes more obvious they are not interested in listening to their core customer base.
5 Likes
If I navigate the new software, I can find the stuff I was watching under Movies or TV shows but the line that showed the shows AND the movies that were not finished is gone.
Okay…. but that’s a bug you are experiencing. Plex has not removed any feature here.
You are talking about the ROKU right? The PC app still works correctly here.
To be fair, at this point and still with no documentation, it’s kind of hard to tell the bugs from what’s intentional.
8 Likes
Why would I bring up the PC app when you are talking about Roku? The PC apps don’t even have the New Experience interface, so it would be a complete Apples/Oranges comparison then. Continue Watching is working fine on Roku here. If you’re missing it, is a bug on your side, it was not removed by Plex.
Came here to say the same. First the mobile apps were made utterly useless and now the Roku UI has been destroyed.
The old UI for the Roku, (even with it’s minor warts) was great, simple, very usable, and perfect in many cases. The new UI is absolutely unusable and awful.
Top menu on a wide-screen TV? My own movies, music, photos and stuff now buried, and very slow to access? There’s no way to pin my library for quick access? Forced to constantly deal with things I DO NOT WANT (Live Tv, OnDemand and Discover)?
Now, when I’m deep down browsing through a library, if I want to get back to the top menu, I have to scroll all the way up through my library to get to the menu!? Or I have to navigate all the way left, and then up, and then across?! Did anyone even try to use this interface with a remote?
I don’t want a “TV Concierge.” I just want access to the contents on my own NAS with a proper UI.
I’ve been a fan of Plex since the early days and it has been utterly depressing watching it slowly be destroyed with no ability to revert or stop it. I’ve given up. Goodbye.
Edit: I’ll also add that I refused to create an online account to access my own private library. Another in a long list of Plex decisions that aren’t user-focused.
10 Likes
