context is key. like all recent major plex changes, this isn’t about making a better experience for users. it’s all about making their shitty ad-supported free streaming service as prominent as possible in the main Plex app. That is their new business, and all of the old self-hosting features are taking a back seat.

From the article;

I think that this debacle could've been avoided if Plex had just taken a more careful approach with its app overhaul.

So, they separated out their photo app from the rest of it, and people got mad because they did a bad job of it. I don't see the problem. There's a lot of reasons to be mad at Plex, but them taking their photos service and putting it into a different app isn't plex trying to make things shittier for money. It's just the regular development required to keep things running well. Except for how badly they did it, apparently.

I don't use Plex. Never did. But I just don't see separating photos from the main app as anything worse than a side-grade. The article mentions how they didn't have a photo app for the TV users, which okay, that's worth complaining about, but if they had done that part right it would actually be less effort if all you wanted to do was display photos on your TV.

No, apple forces you into their services and the cloud. Self-hosting is practically not an option with iOS, or at least a much worse experience.

No. I'm not aware of a good way to sync music to the built-in iOS player; you have to go through iTunes.

Oh ok fair enough, I don’t use playlists and didn’t know there was a max, haven't run into it yet

Is the Plex music library in a standard file system format that can be accessed locally on iOS?

You could use Syncthing (and syncthing-fork on android), but I don't know how playlists are stored, but you can potentially sync that too.

I want it locally on my phone and my computer and both synced with smart playlists.

So what about AirPlay?

You don't need Plex for that. A simple local music player will do just fine if you always want your whole library stored locally.

Nope. It would be perfect if you could, but you have to select individual playlists which doesn't work if you want auto updating smart playlists based on your entire library. I think there's also some overall max amount of songs you can have.

Can’t you already do that with Plexamp?

Please let me sync my entire music library locally to my phone Plex!

I like it. The UI could use some improvments but it's also not worse than the old app. But it did fix all the transcoding issues on my old phone, so that's a big win.