Hi Everyone! This update brings quite a few features and changes to cover.

Dispatch now supports multiple profiles, allowing you to create personalized experiences for everyone in your household.

Most existing personalization options are now profile-specific. This means each profile can have its own favorite apps, feed customizations, wallpaper, and other preferences — all independent of one another.

Here's what else is included with profiles:

You can create any number of profiles. Once you create a profile, you may assign one Plex users to that profile.

When multiple users are assigned to a profile, your libraries, Watch Next list, and other media recommendations will be and displayed together.

You can customize your profile's avatar in a few different ways:

In terms of using the Avatar Editor, you can mix and match parts, styles, and colors to customize your profile's avatar to your liking.

A special thanks to Pablo Stanley for the original designs.

Dispatch now has the ability to hide apps as well as block apps with the experimental app blocker. Like the video player (discussed later), this feature is in early development and will likely have issues. That being said, it has been working reliably for me thus far.

To use App Blocking, you must enable the required permissions from .

Like most options in Dispatch, app hiding and blocking is profile specific. When a user attempts to open a blocked app, an overlay will be displayed briefly before the user is returned to Dispatch.

Only the Admin profile can modify app restrictions.

Some additional notes about these features:

Users should be careful when using this feature. It is technically possible to lock yourself out of your device, if it is not used with care, under these scenarios:

Profiles can have content restrictions applied to them. While it's true your Plex server already supports content restrictions, this allows you to set an of restrictions on a profile if you'd like.

Because of the complex nature of different content rating systems worldwide, the way this feature works is as follows:

Please note as well: content restrictions do not apply to media suggested by other android TV apps, such as YouTube, Netflix, etc... it only applies to your Plex media.

The administrator has the ability to whitelist or blacklist a piece of media for a content restricted profile. Please note that if your media server restricts access to a piece of media on the server level, Dispatch does not ever override it. Only media blocked via Dispatch's Content Restrictions layer is affected by this feature.

This feature can be accessed via the context menu for a piece of media, which is opened by long pressing the select button, or pressing the 3 dots on a highlighted media.

You can add a PIN to a profile, thus requiring the user to enter their PIN before switching to their profile. In addition, the administrator may lock profiles, which stops further customizations of that profile until unlocked.

You can choose to have Dispatch sign out of the current user when the device sleeps or the screen is turned off.

You can also choose whether "signing out" in Dispatch returns to the Profile Selector, or always signs back into a "default" profile. For example, you may wish for Dispatch to automatically sign out on sleep and return to a Guest or Public profile, instead of the lock screen / profile selector.

Dispatch now includes a video player. This feature is early and experimental, but can be enabled in the

The goal of this video player is to, over time, match the Plex app's player in terms of functionality, while addressing these issues:

Now that Dispatch supports multiple profiles, it's understandable that most users would expect that being on would play media AS . Unfortunately, the official Plex app does not support playing media as a specific user. Plex will simply play as whichever user was last logged into the Plex app on your device.

Dispatch's player does not have this limitation. If you enable using the new player, selecting media from the app will always play that media that user,

Dispatch allows you to assign multiple users to a single profile. When you do this, the media shown inside the app will be a combination of accessible media by all users assigned to that profile.

Additionally, when you play media using Dispatch's internal player, playback progress will be updated for all users assigned to that profile. This will allow special use cases such as:

Today Dispatch only supports Plex, but, in the future, support will be added for Jellyfin as well as other media servers. Multi-user support will allow Dispatch to combine, and track playback progress, for the same media across multiple servers.

Multi-user support can enable a "paired" profile set up. For example, perhaps you often watch media with your partner, and want the media you watch together to be tracked on both your Plex accounts, you can use a paired profile. Then later, when you are watching media solo, you can switch to your exclusive profile which only tracks media for you.

There's been a long standing issue with the official Plex app where opening a media externally (aka launching media from the home screen) stops the Plex app from properly reporting playback progress to the Plex server. This is not unique to Dispatch, even the default launcher on Android TV has this issue. With the internal Dispatch player, this is problem does not occur.

There are likely other use cases I haven't considered. Either way, the flexibility is there.

As previously mentioned, the player is in early development. I currently use it as my main player and have had minimal (usually zero) issues playing my content. However, I expect as more users with varying media types, and on different devices, test the player, more issues will be uncovered.

Also, while there's a PIP button in the video player controls, it is mostly non-functional. It was a last minute addition to the release that was only exposed to satisfy some issues with the Google Play submission.

Dispatch now supports Android's adaptive icons for devices that require it. This means that if a device forces a certain shape of launcher icon, Dispatch will respect it. Most Android TV devices aren't affected by this, but it can occur.

Dispatch now has ~50% less peak RAM usage as well as a ~50% smaller APK & base installation size.

The following features are next on the roadmap

And one last note on the two experimental features in this release: these will make their way into the stable branch while they are still experimental. They will, of course, remain turned off by default.

Thanks!

Hi everyone! This update brings all features from the beta branch into the stable branch. Most of these changes have already been covered in previous changelogs for the beta branch, so this mostly serve as a summary

Note that for the stable branch, the update will be rolled out gradually over the next few days.

First, I'll start with what's new for both branches

Large performance improvements have been made to how Dispatch starts up. Users can expect the app to start much quicker than before, as well as be much smoother during those first moments after launch.

Performance improvements have also been made to the movie and TV browsing pages. These are the pages you see when selecting "open x media" from the home page or library tabs. Browsing through movie trailers, cast members, as well as browsing TV shows and episodes is much smoother than in previous beta releases.

Like in the browsing pages, you can now highlight the plot of a media item and access the "extra" media details page.

Users can disable / enable extras from YouTube from the Settings -> Experience page.

Overall performance while using the app has also improved, as well as a variety of visual UI bugs that existed previously.

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First, here's a walkthrough video of the features discussed in this post:

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With this release, the "info" button/action now navigates to a detailed view of the selected media directly in Dispatch, rather than in Plex. In many places, you will now see actions such as "Open Movie" or "Browse TV Show" instead of the previously generic "info" button.

When a movie is selected from either the Home tab, Movies tab, or Search page, users will now be presented with a detailed page for that movie.

Users will see trailers, teasers, featurettes, and scenes from both Plex and YouTube, powered by TMDB.

The movie's cast and crew are also browsable from this page. Selecting a cast / crew member will display all Plex media for this person.

From the main buttons on the movie page, users can now navigate upwards to highlight the movie's plot. Clicking on this will display some more details for this item. Users can scroll up and down in this page using the directional buttons on their remote.

Users can also browse TV Shows. In addition to the cast and trailers found in the movie page, a TV show's seasons are also displayed here. When a season is selected, the episode browser is shown.

Users can browse all episodes in a season and select which one to play, same as in Plex. By pressing down while an episode is highlighted, the user will be presented with that episode's cast and crew. Cast and crew for episodes are loaded once an episode is highlighted. Once the down arrow appears under the episode thumbnail, the cast is available for browsing.

These two buttons are now available from the home page when viewing a TV Episode or Season, giving a convenient way to navigate through your shows. These are also available from the context menu by long clicking an item.

Users can now browse their collections as well. If a collection is missing a background image, a composite image is generated using random posters from the collection.

In addition, users can use the "Select Something Random" button to randomly bring up the detailed view for a random item in the collection. This can be a fun way of picking out a movie or show from a large collection.

Dispatch will now display reviews on the movie details page.

Dispatch will now display a warning when it can't reach your Plex server. Selecting this notification will attempt to automatically resolve the problem if it can, and if not, it will prompt the user with some further diagnostic steps.

One potential scenario where this comes into play is when a user's Plex authentication session expires. Normally, your Plex authentication token , however, under certain circumstances it can occasionally happen.

From the user's perspective, while using Dispatch, this would result in Dispatch "no longer syncing". With these changes, Dispatch will now alert the user that the connection is failing, and upon selecting the notification they would be asked to re-sign in to Plex so that syncing can resume.

Users can also manually re-authenticate their Plex account from Settings -> Profiles & Connections -> Manage Connections

Work on multiple profiles / profile switching continues. It's progressing well and will hopefully be available shortly enough.

Hi everyone! This is update was actually submitted on Sunday but is still being reviewed by Google. Since it's taking longer than usual, I'm making this post now to let folks know what's pending in this release.

The latest version of the Plex API has made changes to their watchlist endpoints. This update addresses those changes, fixing any broken watchlist functionality in Dispatch.

Dispatch will now display reviews on the movie details page.

Dispatch will now display a warning when it can't reach your Plex server. Selecting this notification will attempt to automatically resolve the problem if it can, and if not, it will prompt the user with some further diagnostic steps.

One potential scenario where this comes into play is when a user's Plex authentication session expires. Normally, your Plex authentication token , however, under certain circumstances it can occasionally happen.

From the user's perspective, while using Dispatch, this would result in Dispatch "no longer syncing". With these changes, Dispatch will now alert the user that the connection is failing, and upon selecting the notification they would be asked to re-sign in to Plex so that syncing can resume.

Various fixes and optimizations have been made regarding the media browsing features introduced in the last release.

I still have a few bug fixes that need to be made over the next week or so. After those have been implemented, all features in the beta branch will make their way over to the stable branch.

Work on multiple profiles / profile switching continues. It's progressing well and will hopefully be available shortly enough.

Hi everyone! This update is a large one, so there's a lot to cover. First though, while I originally intended for the next release to be for Profile Switching, I felt the need to re-prioritize the features in this release due to this unresolved issue with the Plex app

This bug essentially makes it impossible to navigate to Plex's movie, show, or episode's detailed pages from Dispatch. As such, I've worked hard to replicate the features these pages normally provide within Dispatch directly. This was always something I planned to do , so it was not a total detour, at least.

As this is a large update, some bugs or issues are expected. If you notice any, please let me know.

First, here's a walkthrough video of the features discussed in this post:

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With this release, the "info" button/action now navigates to a detailed view of the selected media directly in Dispatch, rather than in Plex. In many places, you will now see actions such as "Open Movie" or "Browse TV Show" instead of the previously generic "info" button.

When a movie is selected from either the Home tab, Movies tab, or Search page, users will now be presented with a detailed page for that movie.

Users will see trailers, teasers, featurettes, and scenes from both Plex and YouTube, powered by TMDB. Note that in a future release, and before this update reaches the stable track, YouTube extras will become optional. For now, they are always shown.

The movie's cast and crew are also browsable from this page. Selecting a cast / crew member will display all Plex media for this person.

From the main buttons on the movie page, users can now navigate upwards to highlight the movie's plot. Clicking on this will display some more details for this item. Users can scroll up and down in this page using the directional buttons on their remote.

Users can also browse TV Shows. In addition to the cast and trailers found in the movie page, a TV show's seasons are also displayed here. When a season is selected, the episode browser is shown.

Users can browse all episodes in a season and select which one to play, same as in Plex. By pressing down while an episode is highlighted, the user will be presented with that episode's cast and crew. Cast and crew for episodes are loaded once an episode is highlighted. Once the down arrow appears under the episode thumbnail, the cast is available for browsing.

These two buttons are now available from the home page when viewing a TV Episode or Season, giving a convenient way to navigate through your shows. These are also available from the context menu by long clicking an item.

Users can now browse their collections as well. If a collection is missing a background image, a composite image is generated using random posters from the collection.

In addition, users can use the "Select Something Random" button to randomly bring up the detailed view for a random item in the collection. This can be a fun way of picking out a movie or show from a large collection.

As this was a large and unplanned update, I'll be taking a small break before returning to Profile Switching, which I hope will be ready soon enough. Furthermore, there are a few final touches to the features outlined in this post that I'll be wrapping up as well (Which may come in the form of smaller updates in the next little while or perhaps will ship with the Profile Switching release.)

That's it for now. This update has been released to the beta track first. If testing goes well, it will be rolled out to the stable track as soon as possible.

Users who would like to join the beta track can do so here:

Thanks!

This is a minor update with some changes being tested on the beta track

This setting allows users to change the default action when a media item is opened in Dispatch. There are two options: Go to info page and Start Playback immediately.

These options are found in Settings -> Experience -> Playback Options

When this option is used, selecting a media item from the movies, televeision, or search pages will open the selected item's info page in Plex. This has not changed from previous versions, however, with this update the ethos is applied to the home page as well. When enabled, the from media items on the home page and the will always go to the info page in Plex.

This option is useful for users who encounter a bug where starting playback directly from Dispatch stops Plex from recording / updating the user's playback progress. Unfortunately, this is a bug within the Plex app that has existed for years and also exists when using the default Android TV launcher.

When this option is used, selecting a media item from the movies, televeision, or search pages will start playback in Plex immediately. On the home tab, the and the will always start playback immediately in Plex.

In earlier versions of Dispatch, some users reported some playback lag while using Dispatch. In order to make sure user's media playback experience was never impacted, a feature was introduced to automatically shut-down Dispatch while media is being played.

However, with all the recent optimizations, it's likely this feature is no longer required. As such, for the next while, releases on the beta track will have this feature disabled by default. If testers on the beta track don't report any regressions to their playback experience, this will eventually be rolled into the stable track.

The feature will remain optional, however, and can be turned back on from Settings -> Experience -> Playback Options.

Note, however, that on devices with lower amounts of RAM, it's likely that the Android OS will close Dispatch during playback anyway. Higher RAM devices, however, will notice that pressing the home button will re-open Dispatch much more quickly if it wasn't previously closed by the above option or by the Android OS.

The following has been fixed:

Users who want to join or leave the beta track can do so from here:

With this update, enhancements that have been tested in the beta track over the last two months are making their way to the stable track.

Aside from the first change outlined below (), all other changes listed in this post have already been communicated by the January 15th and December 24th changelog entries.

When users opt to enable Auto-Start in Dispatch, they will now be presented with two options:

This auto start mode is the same as what was previously available in Dispatch. It uses an Android Accessibility service in order to set Dispatch as the default launcher on your device. Unfortunately, all Accessibility Services on Android incur a Users who want to maximize performance on their device should consider using the Advanced Auto-Start Mode instead.

Note: If you are using any other accessibility service, such as a , your device will still take the due to the accessibility service involved.

This auto-start mode uses the help of the ADB TV app from Google Play in order to set Dispatch as the default launcher. When selecting this mode, users will be shown a guide on exactly which steps need to be taken in order to use this mode. Since this mode forgoes using an Android Accessibility Service, UI performance is significantly better than the Simple Auto-Start Mode.

Note: if you already use ADB from your PC to disable the default launcher entirely, the advanced mode achieves the same result.

Each mode has their pros and cons, which are listed in the mode selector and screenshots above.

With this update, all trials have been reset once again. Anyone who has previously tried Dispatch will be able to do so again with a refreshed 14-day trial.

Please keep in mind that the update is being rolled out in stages, meaning you will need to wait until the update is available to you before taking advantage of the trial reset.

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The specific updates that affect performance are too numerous to list, as there are hundreds, but with this update, users should see improved UI performance across the board.

A huge number of changes and optimizations have also been made in order to speed up how fast Dispatch syncs your media. For instance, some operations, which used to be applied to every item in your home feed, have been sped up by ~15,000x

The sum result is that Dispatch will sync with your libraries much more quickly than before. This not only results in quicker syncs, but also better all around app performance, as Dispatch needs to spend far less time processing your media than before.

The clearest example would be Dispatch's

Before this update:

With this update:

When a custom wallpaper has been set, Dispatch will now theme the rest of the app accordingly.

Users can now also configure the wallpaper is shown. For example, in the following screenshots, the user has opted to show the wallpaper on the as well as on the pages.

The following options are available:

Additionally, the user wallpaper will now show in the page, allowing users to preview changes to the wallpaper and the wallpaper's brightness. Options have also been added here to control which pages the wallpaper is shown on, as explained above.

An additional option has been added to control the Shelf Peek opacity when that option is being used.

Dispatch can now optionally display watched indicators in the top right corner of your media items.

Additionally, Dispatch can now display indicators detailing unwatched episode counts, playback progress, how many episodes are in a season release, as well as whether a particular item is trending

These options are turned on by default and can be turned off from Settings -> Experience.

Users can now manually activate their screensaver by pressing the back button while the . This behavior is on by default, and can be disabled from Settings → Experience.

When browsing the home feed, users can now long press the back button to activate the no matter where they are. Previously, the Home Directory could only be activated by pressing the left direction button while the user is highlighting the first item in a row.

As a reminder, the Home Directory is a simplified view of your home feed that is more similar to other launchers and the stock Android / Google TV launcher. It's a great way to quickly see more content on your home screen or zoom out of Dispatch's large artwork focused UI.

These last few updates put a close to a set of efforts aimed at improving Dispatch's performance across many metrics. And while I have noticed some lamenting the fact that new features aren't been added as quickly as they'd like, I felt it was important to improve upon these issues as best as I could first. I believe as a result, Dispatch is on a much more solid foundation than at the time of release. I will of course always keep an eye out for any other potential improvements that can be made in these realms.

Otherwise, the roadmap hasn't changed and work continues on the following features, which I will have more to say about when they are ready.

This update is largely aimed at improving the speed with which Dispatch syncs your media. Like the previous update, the changes under the hood are quite sweeping, even if there are few visual changes.

A huge number of changes and optimizations have been made in order to speed up how fast Dispatch syncs. For instance, some operations, which used to be applied to every item in your home feed, have been sped up by ~15,000 times.

The sum result is that Dispatch will sync with your libraries much more quickly than before. This not only results in quicker syncs, but also better all around app performance, as Dispatch needs to spend far less time processing your media than before.

The clearest example would be Dispatch's

Before this update:

With this update:

Dispatch can now optionally display watched indicators in the top right corner of your media items.

Additionally, Dispatch can now display indicators detailing unwatched episode counts, playback progress, how many episodes are in a season release, as well as whether a particular item is trending

These options are turned on by default and can be turned off from Settings -> Experience.

For those in the beta track who have noticed this error while updating to the previous version, this update also aims to address this issue. If you update and notice this error again, please consider doing the following:

These last two updates put a close to two efforts aimed at improving Dispatch's performance across many metrics. And while I have noticed some lamenting the fact that new features aren't been added as quickly as they'd like, I felt it was important to improve upon these issues as best as I could first. I believe as a result, Dispatch is on a much more solid foundation than at the time of release. I will of course always keep an eye out for any other potential improvements that can be made in these realms.

Otherwise, the roadmap hasn't changed and work continues on the following features, which I will have more to say about when they are ready.

Hi everyone! The bulk of this update are optimizations aimed at improving app performance. In addition, a couple of minor new features and bug fixes have been included as well.

The specific updates that affect performance are too numerous to list, as there are hundreds, but with this update, users should see improved app performance across the board. In terms of changes to the app's code, the performance improvements take up roughly 95% of the code changes in this update.

When a custom wallpaper has been set, Dispatch will now theme the rest of the app accordingly.

Note: A minor bug currently requires that Dispatch be restarted after a new wallpaper theme has been applied. This will be fixed before this feature reaches the stable track.

Users can now also configure the wallpaper is shown. For example, in the following screenshots, the user has opted to show the wallpaper on the as well as on the pages.

The following options are available:

Additionally, the user wallpaper will now show in the page, allowing users to preview changes to the wallpaper and the wallpaper's brightness. Options have also been added here to control which pages the wallpaper is shown on, as explained above.

An additional option has been added to control the Shelf Peek opacity when that option is being used.

Users can now manually activate their screensaver by pressing the back button while the . This behavior is on by default, and can be disabled from Settings → Experience. This feature is not available on devices running Android 14 and above.

When browsing the home feed, users can now long press the back button to activate the no matter where they are. Previously, the Home Directory could only be activated by pressing the left direction button while the user is highlighting the first item in a row.

As a reminder, the Home Directory is a simplified view of your home feed that is more similar to other launchers and the stock Android / Google TV launcher. It's a great way to quickly see more content on your home screen or zoom out of Dispatch's large artwork focused UI.

The following fixes are included in this release

The roadmap has not changed. Work continues on the following features, which I will have more to say about when they are ready.

While features selected for the roadmap are always my main focus, users can still expect other updates to be released here and there addressing smaller issues or features while those larger projects continue to be worked on.

Hi everyone!

With today's update, and many others over the past two months, the launcher has finally reached a level of stability that I'm happy with.

In addition, the trial has moved to a cumulative model, meaning only consecutive days of use are counted. So if you try Dispatch today, and don't feel like it's right for you yet, you can always try it again later and

Summary of issues resolved since the initial release:

The following features have been selected for development next:

I will also continue investigations into the possibility of integrating with , as it is by far the most popular feature request.

The first official release of Dispatch is here! V1 brings one (maybe 1.5) additional features + many more bug fixes as well as some performance improvements.

Media from Android TV's Play Next row will now sync to Dispatch's Watch Next row.

Unfortunately, since very little metadata is known about media in Android TV's Play Next row, these items won't be as visually rich as content from your Plex library (so no logos, for example.) Still, it's better than nothing!

Dispatch's App Peek feature also supports Play Next items from Android TV. If an app has added media to your Watch Next / Play Next row, those items will be contained in a special card in front of all the other media in App Peek.

It is not yet possible to manually add to the watch next row, but that enhancement will come in the future. , on the other hand, can always be added to Watch Next by clicking the "Add to Watch Next" button.

You can individually control which apps are allowed to add items to Watch Next (and Watch Next in App Peek) from Settings -> General -> Home & Wallpaper -> Personalize Media Feed.

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Dispatch comes with a free . Afterward, users have the option of buying the app outright. Pricing differs per region, but in general, the lifetime license hovers around the Big Mac meal range 🍔:

Lifetime license:

Monthly license:

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Lastly, I'd like to take this last paragraph to thank everyone who has helped with testing. Many of you have been very enthusiastic about this project from the start, and it's been a joy working with you all. Thank you for all your help and suggestions, ! 🫡