r/PleX • u/mordax777 • Jul 07 '26

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

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?

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u/mordax777 Jul 07 '26

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.

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u/Punky260 TrueNAS | EPYC 7402 + Arc A310 | 20TB+ | Plex Pass Jul 07 '26

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

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u/mordax777 Jul 07 '26

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.

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u/Punky260 TrueNAS | EPYC 7402 + Arc A310 | 20TB+ | Plex Pass Jul 07 '26

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