As everyone else, I find the new UI for Roku to be an abomination. Every user knows it, and I suspect all but 3 people who work for Plex know it. If I am an investor with this company I would start an online petition to have this Roku UI rolled back and fire the 3 people inside the company who approve of it. I am of an age to have seen many many companies prosper and fail. If Plex is not capable of reading the room on such an obvious misstep, this company is doomed.
I finish with an open invitation to any Plex employee to make a defense for sticking with an UI that is clearly deeply flawed, borderline nonsensical and is pissing off every man woman and child who lays eyes on it.
Strange how it effects people differently. My wife refuses to use it, she even ended up looking online for a solution and found all the complaints here because she thought it was broken, and she doesn’t even have an account. My friends back home all despise it and now only use a web browser and laptop rather than their Rokus for plex. My mum just gave up on it completely.
I use it because I’m just praying it will improve and I spend a lot of time bedridden and in hospital and it helps distract me until I have the energy and clarity of mind to set up an alternative server/client setup. It isn’t getting better though, really. And now I need my glasses on just to see what type of content is in the library I’m about to select, which was clearly determined by an icon on the previous version. It’s just so clearly not designed for a tv and remote.
I’m glad some of you are fine with the update, colloquial evidence says most are not. As I’ve posted elsewhere, I’ve doing the home media thing since XBMC on the OG X-Box and seen scores of variations of UI’s from many different developers. Never really complained about any of them. This last one for the ROKU is poorly done and the outcry supports that assessment.
Plex has at least “acknowledged” the dissatisfaction. This gives me some hope that they will do what is really needed; a simple toggle between a “Classic” UI and the new one. This is typically easy to implement and would satisfy the largest number of users.
They’ve got their money from me as a PlexPass user so I would like for them to succeed, but I’m getting the feeling that they are going to double down on this rather than take advice.
That’s news to me! Can’t say I’ve read every single post on this forum but the only thing I’ve seen from Plex, paraphrased, is “Tough – deal with it.” I guess some would count that as an “acknowledgement”.
They’ve acknowledged it but said they are moving forward with the new UI too. To me people have a choice: Learned to use the new UI or find something else.
To me, it also appears Plex is making their API more accessible. My understanding is that this opens up many possibilities for third-party custom UIs. I think it is a great move by Plex and perhaps will allow groups of users to follow separate developers and their vision for the UI.
No matter what the product is there will be a handful of people that like it, even notorious flops like the Ford Edsel and New Coke had their fans. I first heard of the Roku update when several of my users started blowing up my phone asking me how to fix it and over the subsequent week or two usage of my server dropped to zero. At this point I’ve transitioned everybody over to Emby for my active users and Jellyfin for the people that only rarely use it so they don’t use up the 15 slots I paid for on Emby. I use Plex purely for music at this point and nobody besides me has touched it in weeks.
I think it’s very clear that Plex doesn’t care. They are happy to get rid of users like myself that already paid for a lifetime pass and have no interest in any of their monetized offerings. The sooner the rest of us leave, the less resources they can expend on legacy offerings as they court a whole new set of users that are interested in the ad supported junk. People will stop complaining, either because they resign themselves to the fact that Plex doesn’t care and won’t change or because like me they have moved on to other platforms.
