Plex on my iOS devices has been experiencing a major issue for a few months. During playback of any media the player will randomly jump back to the beginning of the episode every ten minutes or so. I noticed that this always happens when my network changes from wifi to cellular (and vice versa). It can also happen if there is any network interruption in wifi. It used to happen very rarely, but now it’s happening every few minutes. My plex has become unusable on my phone. The issue even occurs when i have the show downloaded and my networks are still on. Its like the app will try and fetch from the server instead of my download and have to start from the beginning of the video. I have to keep my phone in airplane mode just to watch content that I have downloaded. It seems like the new app just cannot keep track of where it was in the episode, and when the network sees any change it has to start from the beginning. Seems a lot of others are experiencing this issue on their apps in the last year. What is going on? Please help with a patch, this is making plex very hard to use or recommend.
Link to other people complaining about this issue
Server Version#:1.42.1.10054
Player Version#:2025.16.0
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>
I believe this is a known issue since the new player came out. I don’t think Plex has commented on it Happens for me as well on Android every single time the network changes from WiFi to cellular or vice versa
Yep, known issue and it’s now become my biggest issue with the new Plex. It drives me insane. Even seamlessly switching between access points can sometimes cause it, even if they’re proper managed APs and not just home style WiFi extenders.
Chiming in to keep this thread open. It happens constantly on my wife’s device to the point she can no longer watch anything on mobile. Her device is on the newest iOS 26, and Plex has been deleted and reinstalled.
I have this too. If I go from wifi to 4g or wifi to a different wifi (even with the same name, just a different router/extender) it either errors out or restarts the episode.
Also, if I try to scroll back, it just goes to wherever it feels like, not where I scrolled to. If I skip back or forwards, it normally (but not always) go to wherever it feels like. And if I skip intro, there’s a 50/50 chance it will skip the intro and a 50/50 chance it will skip to… wherever it feels like. It’s almost like the app have no real clue where I currently am in an episode at any given time.
Oh and if I go back to the main page it’ll say “Uh oh” and I’ll have to restart the app to get my libraries back.
Others online claim to have fixed this as follows:
Go to iOS Settings > Mobile Data
Turn off ‘Wifi Assist’
This solution makes sense to me, in theory, because the feature switches to Mobile Data which, I assume, will cause the Plex Server to see an IP address changes which, potentially, might trigger re-authentication.
I’ve tried this today and will report back. Please try it too and see if it works for you!
This is not a solution to me. Wifi Assist has its purpose, the Plex player should be able to cope with roaming on different networks or between AP’s as it has been able to on the old app. It’s extremely annoying when this happens, and once it starts it just doesn’t stop happening.
I can confirm that turning off wifi assist does resolve the issue. Turned it off and the issue stopped immediately and then once back on it continued to jump all over the place. I understand that this doesn’t “fix” the problem as Wifi assist is an important feature of IOS but it is a temporary work around.
