Sadly, the solution to the new iOS client woes is Infuse Pro

[Krib]

I won’t beat a dead horse: anyone who has spent a few minutes with the new iOS apps knows they’re unusable and will take months/years to fix and reach feature parity with the legacy ones. I’m not going to list the reasons again because they’re all over the forum. The fail here is Sonos-level, and if Plex was a bigger company, this would be on Ars Technica and Hacker News.

I work in software and these apps are unfinished. There’s only one reason half-baked software goes GA: executive pressure. No dev team wants to do what Plex just did, they were ordered to. I feel bad for those guys because I work with them at my company.

Plex had 20% layoffs in 2023 and is losing money. I don’t work there and can’t know, but smart money says they have a ton of technical debt from an old codebase and their new revenue plans that split the app by type of media (like music) depend on getting new versions out now.

Unfortunately, given how much this has alienated customers like me who’ve been using Plex since the 2010s and paid for a lifetime pass, that smacks of desperation or incompetence, neither of which inspire hope this can be fixed.

Notwithstanding issues like this that one just has to deal with, Plex is a good media server. For my devices: iPad, iPhone, and tvOS (updates are disabled there now), it’s no longer a good client.

Last night, after pondering whether to literally install a VM on my Mac to run Windows and do a janky iTunes workaround and restore the legacy Plex APKs, it dawned on me that I just need a new client.

And as it turns out, I can pay $99 lifetime (or $13/yr) for Infuse Pro across iOS/iPadOS/tvOS/macOS. I can feed it my Plex server creds and that’ll just work. With hardware encoding. So, I spent an hour beating on Infuse across all platforms. While it’s not the same as a cross-platform Plex experience, it’s very close. It even tracks my watch status.

Here’s what Infuse looks like on iPad. As you can see, no bloat or nonsense like trending shows, or tv tuner, or whatever new advertiser-driven cruft is on the way. And they don’t appear to collect and sell user data, which I just noticed isn’t true of Plex and probably hasn’t been for some time.

Do I secretly work for Infuse or want to get them some good press? No. Use whatever client you want. I’m simply pointing out that there are options.

My path forward now is using Plex as a server. If that starts failing, It’ll be Jellyfin. Which is open source/free, and Infuse also supports.

Nothing lasts forever.

[ReaperSPTN2109]

i was using infuse for awhile, but had to stop because 1, if you watch something you have downloaded to infuse it wont update plex, instead if you let infuse refresh then plex overrides play progress on infuse. and 2, if you use tvdb instead of tmdb for tv shows then the metadata will be wrong because infuse only uses tmdb aired order. when infuse first started their server integration just over a year ago they had infuse use the metadata from the server but that only lasted about a month then it went back to using tmdb only.

which is a pity because outside of those issues it is the better player

oh and one other thing that would of been nice is if you could have infuse auto download a set quality version but they still havent added that. instead if you want a certain quality you have to do it file by file

[Krib]

I’m sure I’ll find wrinkles, but I just tested the bit about play status quickly. Scrubbed halfway through a movie in Infuse on iPad and then opened Plex on Mac. It had my exact place saved.

I’d rather have end-to-end Plex, but I don’t have that option now since it won’t play some of my movies (not to mention all the missing features and UI holes).

[ReaperSPTN2109]

for streaming infuse is great but the issue with downloaded content is what turned me away plus the issue with tvdb metadata, went and canceled my sub couple months back becuase they wouldnt fix those 2 main issues i mentioned and i had been subbed for years, but then again plex has been getting worse and worse these past couple years too.

but if you use tmdb aired order infuse is an ok alternative, best player ive seen on ios

[ozsmac]

I can also confirm no issues with playback position sync back to Plex, works fine. I started to use Infuse because of issues with Plex iPad app stability (crashing several times a day), issues with Downloads (basically not working and heavily speed restricted), Airplay not working and major issues with MacOS client. I also think that the offical licensing for Dolby in Infuse is a key feature, but really don’t understand if this makes any difference (I posted a seperate question yesterday on that).

The new Plex apps on iOS (iPhone and iPadOS) are a step in the right direction. You can tell that the underlying modern code base is laying the right foundation. If this was released as a seperate “New Experience” client, with the old version still available in the App Store in caretaker mode this wouldn’t be such a problematic moment for Plex. However, the way the App Store runs, if Plex used this approach, it would ruin their app ratings and stars history and fragment the user base, so I get that they had to do the big upgrade at some point…just wish the New Experience could have percolated a few more months to achieve a reasonable feature parity.

Plex devs, we do love you, you are doing some great work here. I also concur with the OP that the failure here is likely exec/management pushing too hard.

I’d love to move back to using a single app, rather than having to split my time over both Plex and Infuse (Infuse has no support for OTV/Live TV for example). Sadly I can’t see that happening anytime soon (so might pull the trigger on a lifetime Infuse sub also).

[SE56]

All of your grievances are under development and should firstly show up for those in the Testers group shortly. As for infuse it’s main pro is it’s player, the UI is a huge back step IMHO. Then if your a mixed environment Family with mobiles or other Home Devices, it’s a nightmare with expected familiar Navigation. So what I’m hearing the end of April were going to see good news. So hang tight as I can’t wait either.

[Raiden85]

I’ve had to switch to Infuse as well due to the current crappy app from Plex. Never used Infuse before, but that app is how Plex should be done. Fast, clean, and actually has features that were removed.

It’s insane that a third-party app does a far better job.

1: Quicker to load.
2: Shows my content first.
3: No stupid live tv or discovery crap on the bottom bar, just home, search, files, and settings. Basically, all of my content and not yours.
4: Onscreen controls are bigger, so they are much easier to tap.
5: PiP works more reliably as they have a dedicated button for it.
6: I can download full seasons with a single button again.
7: Playing back local downloaded videos via infuse no longer drains my iPhone 16 PM battery in a few short hours, unlike the current Plex app, this was never an issue with the old one.

Honestly, Plex, you should be bloody ashamed to have released the current app in its current state as it’s not fit for purpose. I used the old app for a few years without any complaints, until now. If the new app had some more time for polishing then you could have avoided most of the issues.

[SE56]

So which app are you using? Mobile? ATV?

I am concerned, your a 5 day membership and your a judge so quickly. Questions are obvious.

[Raiden85]

I’ve had a premium lifetime subscription for a few years. I’ve never had to post on here until now because I’ve never had a problem until Plex released this new, crappy app, which made a lot of things so much worse.

And my devices are iOS; just the iPhone and iPad are particularly affected. ATV seems fine for now.

[SE56]

As previously mentioned all will be sorted soon as the whole app has been rewritten to accommodate HD file formats

[Raiden85]

That’s understandable, and rewriting the app is a lot of work, and I’m certainly not being nasty about it, but the app should not have been pushed out so soon if they are still working on it. At the very least, feature-wise, it should have been on par with the old one.

One pretty big change two days ago on iOS is they added support for H264/HEVC 10-bit support; the fact that this was missing is insane. I’d class the app in its current state as a beta app that’s close to completion.

[SE56]

Yeah a miss step

[skierbri10]

Infuse works for watching movies and shows, but I can’t watch my live TV antenna. So not a complete solution for me. I will be using it for everything else though.

[darcilicious]

Yup. After several days of this nonsense, I got tired of having to add my own local libraries to my favorites several times a day so I could access my content on my own local server.

Enough already.

[zhonglinliu]

As a video player developer, plex is more like a right direction, it is not a just video player, it comes with more busyness option with more plan.
But for infuse or like me (VidHub), we are just a small team with just one goal, make a best video player for users. We do not have a big plan, this might helps with the app and users.