Hey Plex fam!
Today’s a big day—we’re thrilled to announce a preview (public release coming in early 2025) of our newly reimagined Plex experience, rolling out today for testing (by you!) on mobile, with TV platforms coming very soon! This experience, currently in preview, has been in the works for nearly two years, designed to bring everything you love into one seamless interface—from your personal media collection to on-demand content, along with improved ways to discover and connect with it all. Buckle up as we break down what’s coming your way.
Why the New Look?
Our mission is to create a global community where everyone can discover, experience, and share all of the entertainment that matters to them. This rebuilt interface is just another way we’re staying true to this mission.
One of the key changes is redesigned navigation that makes it easier to dive into the different parts of Plex and discover content with simplicity. Through extensive testing, we found that this new structure not only helps existing users navigate more intuitively but also gives new users a much clearer sense of what Plex is all about. We’ve brought our core features to the forefront, saying goodbye to the days of hidden hamburger menus and making it easier to explore with one hand on your phone.
For personal media pros, we’ve centralized media libraries into a dedicated tab. With the option to favorite libraries and easily access power-user features, it becomes a more personalized experience, with more exciting updates to come!
Thanks to its popularity, we’ve given Watchlist its own dedicated spot in the top navigation for faster, easier access. Since its debut, we’ve seen an amazing surge in the usage of this feature. More and more of you are taking advantage of finding any title, anytime, wherever you are, and linking directly to it across services or adding it to your Watchlist. We love to see it!
Other updates include a variety of reorganizing features such as streamlining the user menu, where you can quickly access your personalized details, such as your profile, watch history, friends, and streaming services all in one place.
More Artwork, More Personality
One of the standout elements of this redesign is the expanded use of artwork throughout the app, bringing visual richness and greater depth to your experience. You’ll notice this especially in movie and show detail pages, cast and crew profiles, and even your own personal profile page. We’ve also introduced title artwork for movies and shows where available—a long-requested feature that adds polish to each page. And we’re just getting started; expect even more enhancements here as we continue to evolve these pages to make them both beautiful and engaging.
Why Roll It Out This Way?
We’ll just come right out and say it: this overhaul is more than a facelift. We made the significant decision to rewrite our apps from the ground up and unify our codebase, creating a streamlined, consistent experience across platforms. Previously, maintaining separate codebases for each platform slowed development and posed challenges in keeping designs and features aligned. With this new unified approach, our team can collaborate across platforms seamlessly, ensuring that each new feature, update, and improvement is available on most platforms from day one, once the migration is complete. The boost to our development speed has been incredible, and should enable us to bring new features to you more efficiently, across more platforms, with much higher quality than ever before.
That’s also why we’re releasing this as an early-access preview. While we’ve done extensive testing, Plex runs on a vast range of devices and networks—more than most platforms—so we need your help to ensure everything works as smoothly as possible. Your feedback is essential to fine-tuning and optimizing the experience for all use cases. By running this Preview alongside the current app, you can have a worry-free test drive, providing your insights without disrupting your current Plex experience.
This approach aligns with our goal to produce focused, media-centric apps across our suite. Now, Plex and our companion apps (Plexamp, Plex Photos, Plex Dash), share common styles, components, and experiences. We’ll be diving deeper into this journey in an upcoming post, including the technical details and benefits it brings to Plex users.
Join the Testing Program—We’d Love Your Feedback!
Today, we’re excited to share this Preview with you, our dedicated community. Please expect this version of Plex to continue to evolve as we gather your input ahead of our early 2025 full release. We recommend spending some time with the new app—a week or two, or even three—to “fully settle in” as we call it. It’s important to note that this initial release will be missing a few features (e.g., offline and cast support) but we will continue closing those gaps throughout the preview period. We’ll be updating the preview weekly (holidays excluded) so be sure to check for updates on features and changes in our forums thread. Once you’ve got ideas and impressions to share, we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Ready to dive in? Head over to the forums for instructions on how to access and explore the new experience. For iOS users, please note there are a limited number of spots, so jump in soon if you’d like to help us shape the final experience.
What’s Next?
Keep an eye out for more blog posts as we dive deeper into our UX journey and the development of our unified architecture. We’re excited to share how we approached the design, our testing and prototyping processes, and all the little discoveries we made along the way. And for those interested in the tech side, we’ll have a detailed look at how our engineering teams came together to make this project a reality—lessons, challenges, and all.
Thank you, as always, for being part of this journey with us—we’re so grateful for your support. Here’s to many more exciting updates and a fantastic holiday season ahead!
With love,
The Plex Team