Plex walks away from VR support

By Simon Cohen March 18, 2024 1:52PM

A person wearing a virtual reality headset. — Samsung

Thanks to Apple’s recently released Vision Pro headset, the VR wars are hotter than ever. And yet, not everyone wants to be a part of the action. Plex — a very popular media streaming platform that folks use to organize and play their personal movie, TV, and music collections — has just announced that it’s discontinuing support for its existing VR client apps.

The affected devices include Google’s Daydream (which itself lost support when Google abandoned it in 2019), Oculus Go, and Samsung’s Gear VR. Plex announced the change via an email to its members who had previously downloaded these apps:

“As part of our efforts to make sure we’re focusing our resources in ways that best serve our Plex community, we’ve decided to officially end support for our Google Daydream, Gear VR, and Oculus Go apps. You’re receiving this email because our data indicates that you’ve recently used one of these apps.”

Plex apologized for the change, noting that “overall low usage played a major role in our decision process. Additionally, these platforms are either currently not, or soon will not be, supported by their manufacturers.”

As is common when companies remove support for a given app or device, these Plex clients will continue working — for now. The risk is that, without the company’s support, changes to the main Plex media server software could cause problems with how these client apps work — or potentially prevent them from working at all.

Plex isn’t just done with legacy VR devices like the Oculus Go and Gear VR — it appears to be reticent about VR platforms as a whole. The company never released a client app for the Meta Quest family of headsets, and it has said it doesn’t have any current plans to support the Apple Vision Pro.

We’re a little surprised by this decision, seeing as the Vision Pro has received nearly unanimous praise as a home theater replacement.

Still, Plex fans aren’t entirely without VR options.

Some users on Reddit report that they’ve had limited success getting the Plex iPadOS app to work on the Vision Pro, while Meta Quest headset users can still buy the $10 third-party Movie Deck app, which acts as client for Plex on that platform.

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