After a few weeks of using the (potentially great) recently added feature that allows pinning a Plex profile to an Apple TV profile, I’ve found that Apple’s implementation of profile switching is extremely buggy and unreliable. As a result, my initial enthusiasm for this feature has faded. Here are the issues I’ve encountered:
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Sometimes switching the Apple TV profile doesn’t switch the Plex user in Infuse. This happens quite frequently, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether Infuse is in the foreground, background, or completely closed when the Apple TV user is changed. This is by far the most frustrating issue.
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The recently added ability to select AirPlay speakers as permanent is completely broken when switching tvOS profiles. Each time a different user is selected, the audio output resets to the default (TV speakers).
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As mentioned by other users and @james, the top shelf functionality on the Apple TV home screen is also broken. Infuse continues to show the main profile’s Continue Watching queue even when a different profile is selected.
All of these issues could be avoided by using the in-app Plex user switching in Infuse (accessible by long-pressing the Plex server icon on the home screen). However, when switching profiles this way, home screen customizations are not preserved: new rows are added, the order changes, and some row titles are incorrect.
Given the unreliability of Apple’s profile switching implementation (and the uncertainty around if or when Apple will fix these issues), as well as the fact that this feature is limited to tvOS, I hope the developers can implement a way to save and retain home screen customizations when switching Plex Home users within the app itself. I would also suggest making the switching UI more intuitive. I really appreciate the integration with this native tvOS feature, but Apple’s implementation falls short and ends up making the experience frustrating.
So, to address the first issue, I tried removing all Apple TV user profiles and adding them back again. Unfortunately, this didn’t help at all. I still have to fully restart the device to make the Plex user switch stick in Infuse, although occasionally (maybe ~20% of the time) it works without a restart.
In another thread about this issue started today, @james mentioned that a full device restore might help. However, I’m hesitant to try that at this point for a few reasons:
- I use a couple of apps that are no longer available on the App Store, so I would lose them permanently if I restore the device.
- Even if a restore resolves the issue, it seems likely that a future update could break user switching again.
- It wouldn’t address the other (admittedly less critical) issues I mentioned, such as the default audio output resetting and the broken top shelf functionality.
So while there may be some workarounds, given the current unreliability of user switching and the fact that this feature is limited to Apple TV, it seems a more practical and long-term solution would be for the developers to allow saving and restoring the home screen layout per Plex user.
Even if tvOS user switching worked perfectly, the in-app switching still feels incomplete, since it resets home screen customizations. I hope this is something that can be improved in the future.
Unsurprisingly, nothing has improved in the newly released tvOS 26.5 when it comes to user profile switching. Since it’s now clear that restoring the device does nothing to improve reliability either, I hope the devs will start looking more urgently at the in-app switching as a better alternative.
It’s frustrating to be stuck with Apple’s half-baked implementation when the in-app profile switching is so close to being usable, yet still impossible to rely on because home screen customizations aren’t preserved between profiles.
Continuing my monologue: as a corollary to this thread, I’ve written up a bug report about what is, for me, the most frustrating issue with the in-app user switching:
Until (or unless) home screen layout preservation is implemented, at the very least the issue described in the linked thread needs to be resolved for the in-app Plex user switching to become a viable alternative for me.