[Beta Track] v1.0.18 [2025-12-12] - Multi-Profile Support, Video Player (experimental), Content Restrictions, Hide Apps, Block Apps (experimental), Performance Improvements, and more.

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!