The entire feel of the app is a beta product. It works as long as you do everything exactly how the developers envisioned you to use it.I feel like I have to force close the app to make sure it works, even basic stuff like just walking away from my home will cause the app to become entirely non-responsive (stop preferring IPv4 locally if you want that to stop devs). Videos should not play if the subtitles haven’t been loaded (how am I supposed to understand what is being played?). I have WiFi 6E, my “auto” bitrate should not be 1.5mbps even though I can pull 1.6gbps over WiFi (even remotely, I have fiber), I’ve even set my “internet” bandwidth to the maximum possible.Compared to plex? 8/10, it’s most of the way there. Compared to Netflix? 4/10, I still get random “Playback errors” on my iPhone 15 Pro Max for incredibly basic H.264 streams that work fine on everything else.

Pros- App is gorgeous both on iPhone and on home PC. It really is like having your own Netflix etc. It manages to pull images and info with ease and combines it into a lovely user friendly package that I use daily.Cons - iPhone app struggles at time to stay connected to Chromecast and the app’s ‘remote control’ function regularly fails to connect stopping the using from all forms of program control (skipping, pausing etc). Constant restarts needed over and over again.Don’t get this app if you your primary usage will be for music as it you will be very dissatisfied. It can’t manage music at all. Grouping, search and almost all features you get from programs like iTunes or any other similar products are missing or do not work. It’s simply bad.Connecting outside of your local network is very difficult and to date after many help articles, lots of reading and many attempts I have still been unable to get it to work. It’s a shame because it would be great to be able to use it away from home and would encourage me to recommend it to friends and family. I’m quite experienced with building pc’s, setting up home and office networks etc so for the average computer user I would foresee this being a very difficult solution to implement properly.Devs - Please keep up the improvements as I would love the above issues be resolved before another suitable solution comes along. Good luck!

Unfortunately the app is getting more and more unreliable over time. It used to be very stable, now it crashes if you look at it wrong. The first time i switch to picture in picture, it continues to play. If I go back into the app, or it plays the next video in sequence, the next time I leave the app it will crash and stop playing.Touching the screen used to bring up the on-screen controls and continue playing. Now it just pauses the video and brings up the controls. This is an incredibly annoying change, and there's no option to go back to the previous behavior. Want to go back ten seconds because you missed something? Now you touch the screen, it pauses, you hit the jump back button, and then you have to hit play again. The controls stay on screen until you wait for them to timeout - you can't touch the screen to get rid of them anymore, because it'll just pause and reset the timeout before the controls disappear again.Who QAs this? It's getting worse and worse over time.

So much of this app works great and far better than Jellyfin, where I just migrated from. The player and media loads up far faster, and you can actually change transcoding quality on the fly without waiting 30 seconds for the player to reset as is the case with Jellyfin.But the UI still has jank that doesn’t feel right for a service asking for over $100 to fully take advantage of your own media and hardware.Most obvious and constant is the top navigation bar, which:-When scrolling down: instantly flashes and hides the logo and buttons, turns gray, and slides to the top of the screen at a different rate than your scrolling. Doesn’t seem intentional.-When scrolling back up: slides the logo and buttons down smoothly along with a gray background that nicely blurs images behind it only instantly/jankily hide said background and shoot the scroll bar to the top of the screen when you get back to the top of the menu.It seems nitpicky, but these are the details that makes the experience feel polished and satisfying, and what Plex offers that Emby doesn’t. Or they can fix this issues and others like it, I would find no reason not to recommend Emby over all othersTL/DR: Many things work well, but jank and lack of polish hold this back from feeling worth the extra $$$ over Jellyfin.