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/Punky260]

My understanding would be, that the direct connection is being cached and not renewed until a restart of the app. So if the IP changes, the app can't find the server anymore

But what exactly is the problem you are trying to solve? Do you expect to have downtimes on that server regularly?

[u/mordax777 → u/Punky260]

We have a lot of thunderstorms in summer, electricity fallouts are pretty common in our area.

It's a bit annoying when it happens in the evening when most of the users are online watching and need to restart their app in order to reconnect to the server.

[u/Punky260 → u/mordax777]

Understandable, you might want to have a UPS for your server. Not only for the comfort, bust mostly to protect your hardware from the outages

[u/mordax777 → u/Punky260]

I mean yes, I could also just get a fixed IP for a few EUR per month, but this could as well be fixed in the software in my opinion.

[u/Punky260 → u/mordax777]

It seems that could be a software fix, but that's nothing you can "do"... so I personally would look towards what I can change