In a previous post, which has since been closed, the suggestion was made to have the Android version of Plex allow user to hit back on the home screen and be prompted as to whether or not they wish to exit the application. While there was a bit of push back to this idea, I was hoping to revisit it, but specifically inside the realm of Android TV and Fire TV applications (which I will simply refer to as Android TV going forward).
The rationale behind this is when you are on the Android TV interface and want to exit the application, there is no easy way to do it short of digging into some menu or settings to force stop the application. On Android devices such as phones this is much easier.
Another example is, if you’re having an issue with the application on the Android TV platform, sometimes it’s as easy as restarting the application to fix it. However, again this results in the user having to dig into the settings to force stop the application instead of simply being able to hit back and choose to exit the application.
If simply pressing back at the home screen is not an option I would even be happy with an exit option being underneath the user selection screen. They’re just needs to be a way to exit this application easily on the Android TV platform.
Well that wouldn’t exactly be the same feature request and, to be fair, the post I quoted isn’t an exact match either.
The feature request here would be to actually have an option, similar to the post to which I’m replying, that prompts you as to whether or not you want to exit the Plex app and in turn it would actually exit/close the application, not just send it to the background.
My original post was actually requesting just to have a confirmation message as to if you meant to navigate away from Plex.
While this may seem like a difference without distinction, if you’ve ever had Plex stop loading covers or stop playing files properly, which is often resolved by simply restarting Plex, you’d know the heartache of having to navigate the Android TV menu system to simply exit via Plex application. It would be much easier to simply be able to press back to exit and confirm the exit or even have an exit button somewhere.
I saw your other post about the crash on a Fire TV and being able to reload the app as a side-effect. Please note that on Android, exiting an app does not actually close it like on other platforms. So the ability to exit the app wouldn’t help with issues where you need to reload/restart the app.
Actually, this is not strictly true. You can indeed use things such as finishAffinity and even the heavy-handed kill process to actually close the program all together. I used to do that very same thing in a custom Kodi launcher that I maintained for the OUYA back in the day. That being said, perhaps a better way would be to have a launcher intent / activity that can be exited back to and sent to the background. This activity could force garbage collection and reset the application to a blank slate. Effectively becoming its own sandbox. This would allow a “restart” without actually having to kill the application.
As for the other post, yeah it’s becoming a huge pain in the butt. The worst part is, if I try to use Network logging, it obviously doesn’t capture the application in its death thralls as it stops reporting. My next step would be to try logcat and see if anything’s reported there, but I just need more time in my days to do that.
