You've ruined my Plex mobile apps!

I hate sideways-swiping and now the albums are a real pain to select. It was much better when the albums display was the same as the artists. It now takes many swipes to get where just a few worked before. I have well over 100 Grateful Dead albums and it now takes forever to get to the last one!! What a mess. Please allow an option to use vertical swiping again so I can see 12 albums at once and can get to the bottom with just a few swipes, as before. This change was not well-thought-out. (It’s the reason I hated Emby.) My users hate the new layout, too. Grrrrrrrr

5 Likes

I just noticed this for collections in the movie section. Now you can only see a few movies and your constantly scrolling. I thought the actual app was broken last night cause it wouldn’t let me scroll up.

2 Likes

I have to agree. This is terrible UX design.

1 Like

The hub header should be clickable to show all albums. Not sure how we missed that, we’ll prioritize getting that back in at the least.

Regarding grid vs. horizontal list, there is some ongoing internal discussion about it, thanks for the feedback.

3 Likes

Good to hear the team is discussing this change. The same issue applies to video collections, and related content. The sideways scrolling is just such a chore to get though it really slows browsing content to a crawl. The profile pics of actors is awesome though. I hope the android app is updated to make them clickable like they are on iOS for easier browsing.

I was really shocked after seeing the Plex Android App after the latest update.

Please add the old episodes and album views again.

1 Like

Horizontal would be fine for tv but who holds their phone sideways (except to watch a video)?

I just stumbled upon this UI change in the artist album list too and mark me down as someone who hates it too. Not only is it slow, as already described, it just isn’t conducive to browsing our collections since it is much less fluid and shows less information.

Literally three weeks ago I showed my brother, with whom I share my music library, how he could pull up the artist card to see the release year of the album, because he was having difficulty finding the newest album by an artist when just using the search mechanism. Now not only is it harder to see the albums, the release year is gone too!

I would think that Plex would better understand their target customers, we are geeks who like to curate, organize, and browse our media collections. Anything that makes this more difficult or cumbersome is not a good idea.

Please, go back to the way it was with a scrolling grid with release year. This new approach is terrible. I do quite a bit of UI work myself and I am amazed at how much side scrolling is utilized when it really sucks. Prime example, the Amazon Fire TV UI, it is all side scrolling ribbons and it blows. Try finding anything in your media collection, you’ll be scrolling forever.

Sorry for the rant… I’ve complained to the Fire TV team too…I guess they think you only want to voice search…

2 Likes

Plex, can you please, please, PLEASE stop making stupid UI changes like this. I thought you’d settled on a single UI interface design you were implementing on all your clients across all devices? So why do you keep changing it?

What is point of switching the album navigation from vertical to horizontal? Instead of a dozen albums visible at once, now the user can only see three at a time. Instead of using up all the available screen space, we now have a huge empty pointless void. Instead of being able to scroll smoothly through an entire collection with a single swipe up, we now have to swipe endlessly to the right to move through a collection. If you’ve got an artist with more than a dozen albums, this is a nightmare.

How has this change improved anything whatsoever?

1 Like

This is the same on iOS and Android so I’m not sure what you are referring to when suggesting things are different.

We are planning to replace the horizontal list for Albums with a grid and the (currently missing) “See All” action will be available for browsing all the albums for artists who have been busy.

3 Likes

Thank you!

I just counted and it takes over 30 swipes to traverse my Dead collection with side-scrolling. It used to take 9 in grid view. (If I swiped quickly, I could get to the bottom with a single swipe.) And, as others stated, no dates anymore is a big issue, too.

Side-scrolling should be reserved for entire page/screen swipes only, IMHO.

1 Like

What the Plex team seems to not understand is that we spend hours and hours organizing our media libraries and we want a UI that allows us to easily browse our media, not what the Plex team thinks we’ll find interesting.

My guess is that Plex views us media collection curators as dinosaurs and so they are moving toward integrating different media sources rather than targeting people who collect media. As a result, they are moving toward a UI that focuses on “discovering” all of the crap they are integrating rather focusing on browsing your existing collection.

I’m not against having things like “related artists” and “popular tracks”, but those are “nice to have” things, the ability to easily browse my media collection is a “must have” thing.

If they really want to foist this upon us, at least do it like the library page, make it so when you go into an artist page, there is a “recommended” tab and a “library” tab, then allow us to default it to “library” tab to only see a grid of our artists’ albums. This is already what I do for the library page, since I generally don’t want to see their recommendations.

5 Likes

Agree. Just noticed this today. the horizontal scrolling is absolutely hideous. Not only does it take longer to scroll through the albums in each artist it also makes it much easier to miss the album you’re after.

i don’t mind it as a “home screen” as such for the artist but at least add an all album button that takes you to the grid view.

And this extends to tv, films and collections as well. Seriously? So for classic doctor who I’ve got to side scroll through 26 seasons.

1 Like

Another vote against the new layout.

It is especially frustrating in TV shows when trying to access the most recent season. In fact, I’d really like the option to disable all the other junk on a show view. I want to be able to flick down to the bottom of the view and have the latest season visible and easy to reach. As it stands, if you flick to the bottom, all you see is More from, Related Shows, and now show Cast, with the seasons just off the top of the screen.

Those recommendations are utterly useless.

1 Like

For the love of God, please change this back! You’ve ruined Plex & made it unuseable. Why on earth would anyone think this was a good idea?

Make it an option for those insane enough to enjoy sideways swiping through hundreds of albums… But allow us the option to have it as it was. Otherwise a lot of us will probably have to look for an alternative :slightly_frowning_face:

1 Like

My issue with this stupid app version is that the resume/start over option has been eliminated (no more play button with progress wrapped around; only a stupid resume button). ALSO, resume doesnt even work on Chromecast! It is starting all of my media from the beginning!

I reached the point of no return with PLEX for Android and uninstalled it. I’m now 2+ weeks into trying out Hi-Fi Cast for music. Couldn’t be happier.

Hi-Fi Cast is intuitive. It features a top-down driven interface that flows the way your libraries and folders are structured on the server. There’s no useless home screen, no need to pin or unpin this or that and no superfluous information.

I also love the fact that it doesn’t merge media from multiple servers. Instead, you have to manually switch between severs, the way PLEX used to work before someone decided to override our decision and reasoning to maintain multiple servers.

Note: It only works when you’re streaming on your home network. That said, it flawlessly accesses local media stored on your device when you’re on the go.

Your mileage may vary. Be sure to enable DLNA on your PLEX server.

Definitely think the vertical option is much more user-friendly. Please change it back asap!