Player Version#: 8.20.1.26670
Hitting back on the home screen should really prompt you if you want to exit the app - this is normally pretty standard practice & is how the Roku behaves. Currently, hitting back on the home screen immediately exits the app.
Similar to [FEATURE] Plex for Android: Option to disable exiting the app via back button. If that accomplished what you want, go vote for it.
Curious why we need to vote for feature parity? This is how the Plex app behaves on the Roku, and how Plex HTPC behaves. I don’t think it is unreasonable for me to expect all of the TV based clients to exhibit the same behavior.
It’s great that Plex has the feature suggestions forum, but that suggestion is from 6 years ago, and really should have only taken a dev like half a day, if that.
It also has to do with platform parity. Almost all Roku and Windows apps have a “confirm to exit” behavior. Very few Android apps do this. I don’t know if this is something Google has rules about, they do for some things, and going against those can keep an app from getting approved for the Play store.
I can say for a fact that I use numerous Android apps that have a “press back again to exit” toast/notification. Both for Android mobile and for Android TV.
Android Mobile:
Reddit Sync - used for 5+ years - will display the toast message confirming you want to exit, as opposed to just going back to the home screen.
Android TV:
Emby - prompts you with an Exit/Cancel upon hitting the back button on the Shield.
We do have an effort to get feature parity between the clients. I will discuss this with the Android team.
I appreciate it. Another feature parity issue I noticed between Roku/Android TV - the up button doesn’t hide the OSD on Android TV, while it does on Roku.
good god no!
there is simply no need to confirm if you want to exit the app.
and i can name thousands more that don’t.
you seem to be assuming that Roku is doing it the “right” way and other clients aren’t.
maybe it’s the Roku client that has it wrong and needs to be brought into parity with others.
Hey @herman_munster - UI/UX is often very subjective, so I will explain my thought process here.
When you are watching a show and you want to head back to the home screen, the most efficient way is to “mash” the back button. However, there is not always the same amount of button presses to get back to the home screen, depending on how you started the show, how many seasons there are, etc. If you start the show from the CW row, you only need to click back twice to get to the homescreen, but if you navigate to the show via Library → Season → Episode, you need to hit the back button 3 times. So half the time I end up exiting the app while mashing the back button to try to get back to the home screen.
The other option of navigating to the sidebar and clicking the home icon can be a pain/is not intuitive for certain end users depending on where you are within the Plex UI. As an example, say you just finished watching The Office Season 6 and you want to watch something else. By default when you are done watching that episode, you will end up with that episode “selected” and you are in the Season view. So you are on S6E26. A lot of people will start navigating “left” and will end up scrolling through episodes until they can finally “click left” and expand the sidebar. This results in 28 clicks to get back to the home screen.
The other option is obviously to go up to the Season selection screen at the top and “click left” until you get to the sidebar there. That requires 5-7 clicks. The last option (which I actually just found while writing this) is to go DOWN to the play episode controls and then you can click left from there to the sidebar. This method isn’t intuitive to me, I’m not sure why, but does result in the least amount of clicks (apart from the back button - this ties the back button in terms of number of clicks.)
Disregarding number of clicks for a moment, it is infinitely easier to just mash the back button without thinking than it is to navigate “properly” to the home screen. I have spent thousands of hours and dollars on my Plex setup, I basically never want to leave the Plex app on my Shield, and if I do, I will hit the dedicated “home” button on the remote.
To your comments regarding “apps that don’t prompt for exit confirmation” - I was merely pointing out that prompting the user if they want to exit is not “illegal” as @anon18523487 was alluding to. There isn’t a “right” or “wrong” here, this is just a suggestion.
Lastly, to your point of Roku doing it “wrong” is also incredibly subjective, and I am not interested in right or wrong, I am merely interested in feature parity. All clients should behave the same in terms of general UX, I am sure we can agree on that. Especially “TV” based clients. Given that the Roku client was developed a full 2 years before Plex started developing on Android(per forum posts - Plex for Roku thread started in 2011, whereas Plex for Android thread started in 2013), and that other Plex apps (including the now deprecated PlexHomeTheater and the new Plex HTPC application) are all “prompting for user exit…” Well, I’ll just leave that to up to your interpretation.
but you are advocating feature parity where 1 device is being treated as the “gold master”, you are comparing everything to the Roku.
as i alluded to , just because Roku does something doesn’t mean it has to be applied to everything.
everything is subjective, and everything you have said is entirely subjective also.
“feature parity” does not mean making the client 100% identical on every device, as each device has slightly different “default” ways of handling apps.
adding in features to account for you “mashing the back button multiple times” doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to do something.
if they removed the “prompt for exit” from the roku to make it the same as the android there would be parity - would that be a good outcome for you? afterall it bring “feature parity”.
I go on to list 2 other clients that have this functionality. I will admit I do not know how Apple TV behaves, nor do I know how the Plex for Smart TV clients behaves.
I also go further to explain why “button mashing” is more efficient, when it takes almost 30 clicks to go back “the intuitive way.”
If they removed it from all of their apps that do this and all apps behaved the same, yes.
it wouldn’t solve your “button mashing” issue though.
there seems to be a desire, not just in this post, from some to have every single device act and operate the same way for any particular cross platform app- but that’s not what “feature parity” means.
Ok, thanks.
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