Why are downloads such a poor UX?

Plex Media Server
1

I find myself again on the road and trying to download some videos from my Plex server back home onto my tablet so I can watch things when on the plane. I’m currently in my hotel room and bad hotel wifi aside, I cannot, for the life of me, download this one movie. I managed to download one movie and then it got stuck on the second movie. Just kept saying it was downloading the first movie. That lasted for a while but then finally the first movie was downloaded. The second and 3rd movies however just sat in the download queue spinning their wheels.

I rebooted the tablet to clear out this stuck state and even deleted the 2nd and 3rd movies from the download queue then readded them. Similarly, the second movie took a while to start but managed to download.

The 3rd movie, however, refuses to download. When I go to Downloads it shows the first two movies and the 3rd one now has a spinner. Rebooted the tablet again and reconnected the wifi but it remains spinning and never downloads. Under the notifications shade, it says “Initializing downloads” and has a progress bar at 100% but that never finishes nor goes away.

Force-closing Plex does no good either. When I start up Plex the situation is the same, 2 downloaded movies and the 3rd one is stuck.

And here’s the kicker… Bad wifi or not, I can actually play that 3rd movie! That proves that the wifi works, I can connect to my PWS at home and it can communicate with me in the hotel room over the wifi (my tablet is wifi only). I just can’t f-ing download the sucker!

Meantime the spinning download and the initializing downloads thing sits there. I timed it - a full 18 minutes and counting! Why doesn’t it either download or timeout? It’s not just frustrating - it’s maddening!

OK, so I switched to my laptop and tried downloading it using Plex web here. I can probably transfer it to the tablet later. The URL it’s using is [removed by moderator]. It’s going slowly but it appears to be downloading.

So back to the subject line - why are downloads such a poor UX? It should just work (or just fail)! Why can I stream, but not download a movie?

MODERATOR EDIT: Never post your Plex Token. It is a major security risk.

2

plex destroyed sync as some people had problems with it for this awful downloads system which many people have problems with. I i type this 12 ep of a tv show that have been trying to download for around a week.
I used to have the odd problem with sync but i have constant problems with downloads, - both my servers fail to ever download anything anymore.
Prologue and plex amp work fantastically of home network though so its not something with the servers configuration.
I would get all respect back for plex if they agreed they dropped the ball this time and reverted back to something that actually worked. I miss the old xyz sync appearing on my phone - the iphone now has to have the screen on to have any chance of working - this wasn’t the case on the older sync - yet plex blames apple ???
The user experience now is so poor from my point of view ive stopped recommending plex full stop for the time being.
I really miss the earlier days when it was much simpler.