Total dislike the latest version of Plex - refund or rollback please?

Plex Players Mobile Devices
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Dear Plex Team,

I’m writing to express my deep dissatisfaction with the recent decisions made by Plex, particularly concerning the latest iOS and tvOS updates.

To be completely honest, I strongly dislike the new apps. I’ve deleted them from all my devices today because I can no longer tolerate the degraded experience they offer.

As it stands, it seems I can’t go back to the previous, fully functional versions of the Plex apps — the experience I originally paid for. Is there any way to request a refund for my lifetime license? Alternatively, could you at least offer access to a legacy version of the previous app, or a rollback option?

To me, this appears to be one of the worst decisions in Plex history.

If you’re going to force your existing customers to switch to entirely new software, you should at least provide a working legacy version of the previous app. Or, if this is truly a new product, give it a new name — something like “Plex II Experience” — and don’t force us to switch. The current version is not what I purchased years ago.

Many features we relied on have been removed, and the new interface has become unnecessarily complicated — especially for older users. I know several people who are switching to Emby or Jellyfin, and from what I can tell, a significant portion of the Plex user base is unhappy with the recent updates.

Please consider giving us access to the previous version of Plex or issuing a refund.

Plex used to work flawlessly. There was no need to split the experience into multiple apps or to fix what wasn’t broken. The old UI was clean, intuitive, and easy to learn. I’m a 54-year-old veteran, retired and relying on a stable home media setup. These forced changes have completely disrupted an ecosystem that used to work perfectly for me. Now, almost nothing functions as it did before — and the experience is riddled with bugs.

If you ignore this kind of feedback, Plex may soon experience what I would call the “Sonos effect.” The rising number of negative reviews on Google Play and the Apple App Store is already a clear indicator of how your customer base feels.

Just my two cents.

Sincerely,
Tom

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While I agree, the fact is the “rating” of the Plex app is still quite high out there. So, people aren’t actively changing the app rating and leaving their “5.0” in place, at least today. Which means that the vast majority of Plex users, as far as tangible stats go, seem to think the new UI is a “5.0”. If that doesn’t change… I don’t think any of this gets heard by the Plex team.

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We did call them out on their own employees giving the new changes 5 star reviews so I don’t think they care about anything the actual users say.

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While it’s possible they could somehow manufacture hundreds of thousands of fake reviews, have a feeling they would not be able to. (I could be wrong)

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Heh, thanks for the idea. I don’t usually write app store reviews anyway, but I’ll throw my 2-star in there just because I can.

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Time to update my review online. I agree that the previous versions of Plex were useful and the latest is a pile of garbage from a user experience perspective. Downloads a much faster, but useless since we can no longer specify sync lists, and the download folder is just a pile of files and no longer sorted.

My frustration comes from going through the feature requests and seeing others post asking for the functionality to return and they are closing the threads with a “no” and no other explanation. If there is something better coming, please let us know. For now we just see you don’t care what we are asking for.

I have been a lifetime member for a LONG time and it might just be time to consider a different media server if the company is going to drop crap on us and not even engage in discussing what we, the users, want.

Please understand we are asking for the features back that made this a fantastic product. I do like the idea of allowing a legacy interface with the features we all want!

(For now…)

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Agree, bad move on Plex part. Why in the world would you fragment a perfectly working mobile app that allowed full access to your personal content just as the web version and tv has. Makes no sense having 3 separate mobile apps. Plex needs to re-evaluate their decision and bring back the Single App for all your content approach.

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I just checked the google play store page and it showed my my old review from the last time they updated the android TV app (to the current interface that I quite liked) which fixed most of the issues I had with the UI before that, which was abysmal. Yes there were teething issues with that one at first too, but it never felt like we had been forced into early alpha testing of a v0.0.1 test build like this roll out has been.

I compared the outgoing interface to the OLD classic kodi style vertical bar interface they had way back in the simpler, better times and was very positive, at least it was when all the discover/suggestion rubbish was disabled.

I’ve now deleted that one. will submit a new one soon.

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Nearly EVERY new review on both stores is only one star though. The average rating is also falling, but quite slowly. But I guess there are quite some people, who did not change their old review to one star.

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Agreed
And adding this on top of it all, unfortunately

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Agreed.
For me it is just not working anymore.
Not sure what’s going on, but I just can’t use it.
Can’t select audio once started, can’t select subs, can’t select video quality.
And I just don’t get subs on some titles without any explanation.

To add insult to injury, I just can’t start same title (or any at all?) from web interface from my laptop - “something is not ok” or alike and it just stops.

Most recent server, linux, chromecast. Netflix is working fine with all same hardware.

What’s going on? I’m just considering dropping the subscription as it become useless.

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Remote play is now broken for my 20+ users - they can browse the server, but play just hangs with the wait spinner, then ‘Error opening input’ fail message. Have they added a separate streaming port or something?

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100% Agree. Very well said!

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I disagree. The rating is high because all of those old ratings still describe the tried-and-true old plex experience. There’s no other way to interpret that in reality.

Saying “because users didn’t change the ratings, it must be good” is poor logic. Perhaps that is what Plex’s leadership is doing, which would explain a lot.

If anything, the difference between the old and new is what needs to be examined. Go view the ratings, and sort by most recent. Compare those to the ratings in 2024. The problems with the new experience are glaringly obvious.

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Personally, I don’t think they should release the old version under a new App Store listing. That’s totally misleading by attaching the old ratings to the new app.

They should restore the old app under the CURRENT listing, then release the “new experience” under a new listing.

Then we’d see the honest difference. That is, assuming that decision-makers at Plex are interested in honest feedback and an accurate view of the real world.

Am I assuming/asking too much?

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The rating have zero to do with “time” and everything to do with current reputation. That’s the only way they matter. And old “good interface” ratings is used to promote the current UI (unfair). So, the only way to really reflect reality is to change your rating.

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Pretty sure they use a weighted algorithm to prevent review bombing causing too much damage, which is understandable of course, bad updates happen and are usually fixed (…usually…), but their way of doing it does tend to hide the negative reviews behind the outdated 5 star reviews so new users might not know what is going on.

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I just noticed the music stripped from last android Version. tried the extra pex music app and it cant play my lib pleas put music back in. I got plex as a one stop to do it all not an app for Music an app for tv and an app for pictures,

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I’m going to chime in as another “removing music was a profoundly bad idea” vote.

I use plex for access to my libraries of media that I have painstakingly imported from physical media. Plex just got vastly more annoying to use.

Joel

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