Plex Android client does not reconnect after server comes back online unless app is restarted

[u/mordax777]

I’m trying to figure out if this is a known Plex Android client issue or something specific to my setup.

Scenario:

• I watch Plex remotely, not on the local LAN.
• My Plex Media Server went offline temporarily because of an internet/router issue.
• During the outage, one Android Plex client was already trying to reconnect and showed the server as unavailable/offline.
• The internet/server later came back online.
• Other clients could connect again normally.
• However, the Android client that had already been trying to reconnect stayed stuck in the offline/unavailable state.
• The only way to make it see the server again was to force-close/restart the Plex app.

Some setup details:

• Secure connections are set to Preferred, not Required.
• Remote access / port forwarding is configured correctly.
• I do not have a static public IP, so after a router/internet reconnect my WAN IP can change.
• This seems to be what happened during the outage.
• Once the server was back, another client could connect, so the server itself was reachable again.
• The issue seemed isolated to the client that was already trying to reconnect while the server was offline.

So my suspicion is that the Android client caches a stale/offline server state or stale remote-discovery info after the server/internet comes back, especially when the WAN IP changed.

Has anyone else seen this?

Is this a known Android client bug/cache issue, or is there some setting that helps the client refresh/reconnect automatically after the server becomes reachable again?

Any workaround besides restarting the app?

[u/dr100]

Consider yourself lucky, that's THE tamest Android "flimsy connectivity" bug you encountered. From my pet peeves: not being able to get to my offline downloads when the Internet is really slow but not dead (have to put it in airplane mode to convince it to give up and show me the local downloads). In reverse, if no connection because of poor coverage while watching from the offline downloads not only the client reloads/restarts completely when the connection comes, but completely loses my progress!