I'll disagree with you caltrask. You really can't just have a team of people work on one thing, then switch to another client then to another. They need different skill sets and each client uses different APIs etc. You want a team (1 or more people) to work on specific clients. What you suggest is close to asking professional race car drivers to run Indy, then NASCAR, then Rally then Formula 1 depending on what race the "team" needs to win most. While the drivers are all professional they have different skill sets and you can't easily pull a rally racer and put them behind a formula 1 car or vice versa and think things are going to work out well.
You will probably have a few devs who can work on multiple things due to overlapping skill sets or because they've had to work on different projects but this is more the exception then the rule just as you can find a few drivers who can race both NASCAR and Indy.
I disagree with your analogy. You can have just one team working on one thing if you know how to properly manage it; that means making and meeting deadlines, squashing bugs, etc, and at the very least, keeping up with all the other platforms with some kind of structured schedule.
If you are in the position of a manager, or any leadership role, it is your duty to ensure that everyone is on the same schedule, not this "whenever I feel like releasing something" or "whenever I get around to it." And while those are clearly exaggerations, it isn't hard to imagine that having remote employees offers up the opportunity to be lazy or not "feel the fire under the butt." And once you separate these people based on skillsets(these so-called racecar drivers), and let them "do their own thing," you get a staggered mess of releases and lack of updates, which is exactly what we have today.
The big problem with having such a spread-out team, or individuals, or whatever, is that there is no cohesion and no sense of unity among the platforms. Why is that? The answer is easy: Too many platforms to manage. I also imagine there simply isn't enough team members working on the same platform, and why some are so incredibly far behind and/or not working as they should be. The Xbox One release is a perfect example of this—they pushed out its release under the guise of being a full-fledged app, hoping to get more subscribers, and in the process pissed off their already loyal customer base. Next, take the iOS app that requires users to pay for it. Is that platform being favored? No. Should it? I would argue yes, at least more favored than the Android version. And it's important to note that I paid for it because I wanted to support Plex. However, I don't feel that Plex is returning the favor.
One of the most important duties as a manager/leader is to ensure that your paying customers are satisfied; if there are issues, you address them and you fix them the best you can. Don't get me wrong, I think some of the people at Plex work their butts off and try to please everyone; you know who they are because they are the ones who actually communicate with us every once in a while. I don't expect, by any means, that they please every single customer but at least make more of an effort. We know that they come to the boards, that they read our posts, so why not jump on the opportunity to improve? It's not like this is the first time someone has complained about [fill-in-the-blank], but it sure seems like it is because these problems aren't going away.
It would be nice to know if there was someone in a leadership role that is upset with the fact that one platform is seemingly favored and gets more updates, e.g. Android. It would be nice to know somebody at Plex sees the problem(s) with their current business model, lack of uniformity, lack of communcation etc, and wants to change that. Do you think anybody at Plex is pissed off with the lack of updates for iOS? Probably not.
The management of Plex does not reflect a willingness to change or make things right with a large percentage of its cutomers, which would be hard to argue considering: how many complaints are in a given thread, how many people have said they're going to ask for a refund, how many countless bugs have piled up with absolutely zero replies from the devs. This is the attitude that we are getting, and why people on this board are upset—there is a general, laxed attitude about fixing bugs that have been around for months. There is a general, laxed attitude with the devs NOT communicating with us about anything really.
