Pluto TV Update Broke It: 91 of 145 Reviews (2026)

Pluto TV has one job that no other free streamer does as well: you open it and it behaves like a television. Channels in a grid, up and down to move between them, a guide that tells you what is on at nine. In the first days of September 2026 an update replaced that, and the review page turned over.

ABSOLUTELY HATE THE NEW FORMAT; VERY USER UNFRIENDLY AND NO WARNING, NO DISCUSSION WITH USERS. TWO DAYS AGO I WOULD HAVE RATED THIS APP 5 STARS!!!

what happened why did the format of changing channels changed on my tv, I can not change channels by just pressing up or down on my tv controller any more I have to go live tv and choose the next channel. frustrating and very poor design poor poor poor

This piece measures that turnover. It is not a review of the new design. It is a count of what the people who use the app every day say stopped working, taken from the 4,000 most recent US reviews, split at the date the wave starts.

What We Read

We pulled the 4,000 most recent US Google Play reviews for Pluto TV on 12 September 2026, along with the live store metadata. The listing shows 3.74 stars from 806,197 ratings on more than 100 million installs, developer Pluto, Inc., last updated 9 September 2026, ad supported and with no in-app purchases. On the App Store the same service holds 4.78 from 1,619,784 ratings, version 15.25.0, released 4 September 2026.

That gap is the first thing to say out loud. Two ratings for the same free service, more than a full star apart. iOS ratings run higher than Android ratings almost everywhere, but not usually by this much, and nothing below is an iOS measurement. We read Android only.

The 4,000 reviews cover 21 August 2025 to 11 September 2026, 386 days, with no gap in the middle. That matters more than it sounds: because the window is continuous, counts from one month can be compared with counts from another without worrying that the corpus ran out. Of the 4,000, 2,098 are 1-3 stars, and 1,193 were long enough to describe something at 100 characters or more. Of those 1,193, 62.3% are one star.

Then we split the corpus on 2 September 2026, the day the daily review count triples.

Quick Answer: What Changed in the Pluto TV Update?

Pluto TV shipped a redesigned Android app at the start of September 2026, and in the nine days that followed, complaint volume roughly tripled and the daily star average fell from 3.15 to 2.32. We read all 145 substantial negative reviews from 2 to 10 September and hand-sorted them: 91 of them, 62.8%, describe a capability that existed before the update and does not now. The largest group, 23 reviews, is channel surfing: reviewers say they can no longer move between live channels with up, down or a swipe, and must return to the guide and confirm a selection each time. Fifteen say the guide no longer shows what is on next. Seventeen name a removed control, and seven of those seventeen are specifically about the mute button, which several reviewers say they used on the ads. Thirteen are about favorites that will not save or will not stay in order. The identical channel-surfing complaint appears in Spanish, Portuguese, German and French reviews from the same nine days.

The Nine Days

Everything in the corpus before 2 September 2026 is one group, and everything from 2 to 10 September is the other. The scrape day itself, 11 September, is excluded because it is partial.

The version strings line up with the dates. Build 17.0.3 appears in three reviews from 20 August, 17.0.4 from 28 August, 17.0.5 from 3 September and 17.0.6 from 9 September. Of the 91 regression complaints we counted, 61 were filed from a 17.x build; the rest come from users still reporting a 5.6x version string or none at all, which is what a staged rollout looks like from the outside.

One caveat belongs here rather than at the end. Every redesign produces a spike of people who dislike the new look, and some of the 145 are exactly that. So the more interesting measurement is not the volume. It is which specific, checkable claims went from almost never appearing to appearing constantly.

Channel surfing goes from four mentions in a year to seventeen in nine days. That is not a matter of taste.

What the 145 Complaints Are About

We read all 145 and assigned each to exactly one category.

The five middle groups, the ones describing a thing that used to work, come to 91 reviews, 62.8% of everything substantial written in those nine days, and 55 of the 91 are one star.

1. Channel Surfing Is Gone (23 Reviews)

This is the largest single group and the most consistent. Reviewers describe the same sequence: they used to press up or down, or swipe, and land on the next channel. Now they say they have to leave what they are watching, open the guide, pick a channel and confirm that they want to watch it live.

The most recent update ruined a good thing. The new menu makes it impossible to scroll through channels manually. You always have to go back to the channel guide, scroll through listings, click on an option and then click again that you want to watch it now.

the app was great but after the last update, it's been a nightmare. you could channel surf up and down the list of channels, not anymore, to watch "live" TV, you need to find what you want, click on the channel, confirm you want to watch the live channel and then you're locked into that one

updated since reaching out to customer service: sucks to be me!! they hear me, but aren't listening. since the latest app changes, I can no longer change channels while watching a program. I have to go back to the channel menu and change channels that way. so aggravating!!

Three details inside this group are worth separating out, because they explain why the complaint runs hotter than an interface preference normally would.

It is a television-shaped habit, not a feature request. Several reviewers describe using Pluto exactly the way they used cable, and the loss lands on the people least able to route around it.

the new update made it unusable to my 75 year old mom. she gets confused by menus and likes old school change channels by pressing up and down on the remote. their new update removed this function

It was also the escape hatch from an ad. At least one reviewer is explicit that channel up and down was how they left a commercial they did not want, which means removing it and keeping the ad load changes both at once.

On my TV, it looks like the latest update took away the ability to change channels by pressing the up/down on the center circle button on my Firestick. This feature was great for changing the channel when a commercial came on that I didn't like.

It is device-wide, not phone-only. The complaint arrives from Firestick, Roku, Android TV and tablets as well as phones, which is why it reads as a design decision rather than a phone-layout bug.

2. The Guide No Longer Tells You What Is Next (15 Reviews)

A television guide answers two questions: what is on, and what is on after this. Fifteen reviewers say the second answer is gone, replaced by a row of artwork tiles for the current programme.

We used to be able to see what was on later on any channel. Now we only see the current show with no inkling as to what may be on later. Very frustrating! I liked your old format MUCH better.

Keeps getting worse, how do they do it? The live feed shows the current channel and show and nothing else - used to display several rows of channels, easy to scroll thru what is playing and coming up next - ALLLLL gone.

new update zero stars. bad. doesn't work. they removed huge TV guide listing for 3 little TV channels at a time, making it impossible to find channels. worst app ever!

Who tests your app??? I love me some pluto, but I can't see what's next now??? Surely, you got rid of it based on your analytics, but I thought it was wicked awesome

One reviewer connects the guide change to the channel change, which is the clearest description of the new flow anyone in the corpus gives.

The new update SUCKS. The TV guide/grid style was perfect. Now it doesn't show "favorites" like it used to, opens on a random channel instead of the previous one watched, doesn't even tell you the show title on each channel-it shows a picture of an episode so you have to open each one to see what is playing.

3. Favorites Will Not Save, or Will Not Stay Put (13 Reviews)

Favorites were the most-mentioned of the five controls we tracked even before the update, at 4.2% of substantial complaints. After it, they appear in 22.8%. The complaints split into two shapes: the heart does not take, and the list will not hold an order.

Pluto Tv has been great .... Until this newest update. don't like how the live TV is set up . and the biggest part im upset about is it's not allowing me to make the channels favorites with the heart . I press the heart to add as favorites but it doesn't add it . the older version is 100% better.

amazing, every update is worse than the previous one. I still seem to HAVE favourites, but they aren't grouped so I can't just swipe between them, I HAVE TO SCROLL which you claim is no longer necessary....

...whatever yall did with pluto sux i mean SUX!!! i had my fav in order that i like and easy for me to find now i hve no order. plus everytime i open pluto it starts off on a totally different channel i had it on..

last update broke funtionality. new interface layout forces you to scroll through endless tiles to find your channel even if you use a sign in account and save a channel in favorites! before this you could simply go to your favorites and watch a channel in one click.

That last one is the whole argument in one line: a saved favorite is supposed to remove scrolling, and the reviewer says the new layout gave the scrolling back.

4. The Mute Button, and the Rest of the Missing Controls (17 Reviews)

Seventeen reviewers name a control that is no longer there. Seven of the seventeen are about muting, which is a small number in absolute terms and a strange one in context: this is a free, ad-supported service, and mute is what people used on the ads.

After Plutos most recent update, they removed the mute button for ads or atleast thats how it is on my android. This is the reason for a 1 star review. I don't mind waiting for ads to play through, but I don't care to listen and I don't want to adjust my volume every time an ad plays.

I would have given 5 stars if you hadn't taken away the mute button. I watch on my tablet and need that button.

this used to me my go-to streaming app, but now you can't mute commercials or change the channel while commercials are on. bring back the mute button!

Android. Pluto TV. Mom always said don't look a gift horse in the mouth, so I haven't complained. However the latest update removed several features that I actually liked: Mute during commercial; Mute during show playback and seeing show progress during the commercial.

The other ten in this group name something else that has gone: the zoom or full-screen control, the settings screen, continuous play, and the search-while-an-ad-runs behaviour.

worked great until the last update. why did you have to mess with something that was wonderful. I can no longer mute....or change screen size. You basically took all our control.

Latest update for Android is a massive downgrade. Layout is very difficult to use now. There is no way to zoom to full screen as there was previously. The new placement of the controls is awkward. I cannot use a remote to scroll when searching for a program like before.

I don't know why when you update things you take away certain settings. I use pluto for background noise and to keep playing when I'm not home for my pets. since new update it doesn't continuously play.

I don't like the update. Now, I can't see my search history and the option of being able to search and browse during commercial breaks while concurrently watching is no longer available. When I press home from full screen, the small picture window goes black.

We want to be careful with this group, because a control that moved is not a control that was removed, and a reviewer cannot always tell the difference. What we counted is the claim, which is that the reviewer looked for something they used and could not find it.

5. The Broader Layout Complaint (23 Reviews)

The last regression group is the softest one, and we have kept it separate for exactly that reason. These 23 reviewers say the new app is harder to use without naming a single missing control: more scrolling, smaller text, opening on the wrong screen, losing the channel they had left it on.

My favorite app until they changed it with a new update. This was not a small update, rather a complete overhaul of what the app is and does. Before it felt like you were perusing/choosing programs (like watching TV).

New update stinks! They really messed it up! Small print, everything crammed together, On Demand missing & others, OVERALL HARDER TO NAVIGATE!!! Change it back Pluto!!!!

One of them answers the release note directly. Pluto's own framing for the redesign, as this reviewer quotes it, was less scrolling and more streaming.

New update makes it Suck! they say less scrolling more steaming, but now it's nothing but scrolling to find what I want and they took away the anime section and a few others now I can't find them.

If you think this group is just taste, subtract it. The four specific groups still come to 68 of 145, 46.9%.

What Did Not Change: Ads and Stability

Two things are worth reporting because they did not move much, and both cut against the simplest version of this story.

Ads were already the running complaint, and the update did not displace them so much as bury them. Across the whole 1,193-review corpus, 382 substantial negatives, 32.0%, mention ads or commercials. Splitting on 2 September, the keyword share falls from 33.5% before to 22.1% after, and as a primary complaint, the thing the review is actually about, ads account for 14 of the 145. The drop is what happens when a redesign crowds a standing grievance out of the top of the review, not evidence that anything changed about the advertising. Exactly one reviewer in the nine days claims the ads got longer and more frequent with this release, and one more names ad revenue as the motive for the redesign. Neither is corroborated inside the corpus, and reviews cannot measure an ad load anyway.

About 3x the ad breaks and longer commercials compared to their competitors like Tubi with 30 sec. ads. App glitching, commercial freezes are really annoying. Occasionally the app will completely crash.

Crashes are the second-largest after-group at 26 reviews, but crashes were always here. Some of the 26 explicitly tie the failure to the update, and others describe the kind of buffering and playback error that shows up in every month of this corpus. We did not try to split them, because the reviews do not reliably say.

Everything was working great until the update. Now it's a constant "content is not available at this time" message

the app was great until it updated 9-7-26 on my phone now it won't load it just stays on the letters pluto and is buffering. sometimes if I restart my phone it works but not anymore. Google pixel 10 pro phone any help on this

If I could give it a 0 star I would. it no longer loads on my streaming Channel lists on my Sony Bravia x85j. After the latest update it has been a disaster, it worked perfectly before that update.

The Same Complaint in Four Other Languages

We then read Pluto TV reviews from 19 non-US storefronts, 1,756 of them, of which 1,556 were not already in the US set. Two notes on method. Google's feed buckets by language rather than country, so the Mexican, Canadian and Australian requests returned the Spanish and US sets verbatim and were discarded by review ID. And of those 1,556, 280 are substantial negatives, 54 of them dated 2 to 10 September 2026.

Of those 54, 22 mention an update. For the channel-change claim specifically, a keyword screen returned 8, one of which turned out on reading to be saying the opposite, and reading the remaining 46 by hand found 4 more that did not use any of the search terms. The honest count is 11 of 54, in three languages, inside the same nine days.

Spanish

Antes la interfaz era simple y funcional ahora con su actualización es horrible no puedes cambiar de canal presionando un botón tienes que ir al guía de canales y buscar el canal que deseas y no sirve de nada tener la sección de favoritos te manda a cualquier canal ojalá vuelva a ser como antes por

Spanish

Me gustaba bastante pero la última actualización lo jodió, antes se podía cambiar de canal como si fuera una televisión, ahora ya no... hay que abrir la guía...y más cosas peores

Spanish

exelente App, me encantaba hasta su ultima Actualizacion que presenta muchos Problemas y Errores en mi Tv 😞 y veo que no soy el unico despues de leer tantos comentarios, espero lo reparen pronto, ya no se puede cambiar ni seleccionar Canal normalmente con el boton de subir o bsjar y

The Spanish corpus also contains the clearest statement of who this change costs the most, and it is the same person the American reviewer described in section 1.

Spanish

Muy mala la última actualización. La usábamos mucho porque era fácil de usar para adultos mayores; ya que antes apenas entrabas a Pluto TV la transmisión de canales comenzaba automáticamente y podías ir cambiando canales con los botones de arriba y abajo, muy sencillo y práctico en Smartv.

Portuguese reviewers name the remote control keys directly, and one of them adds a second constituency.

Portuguese

então eu não gostei dessa nova interface da tv, antes ligava a tv e já ligava no canal onde parei, e dava pra mudar de canal nas teclas ↑↓ do controle remoto, agora com a última atualização mudou tudo ficou mais difícil tem que voltar na guia de tv pra mudar de canal. Porque fizeram isso?

Portuguese

Ficou muito ruim a última atualização do Pluto TV para Roku mod: 3930 que não tem avanço de canal separado... não existe mais como assistir TV de forma simples, tem que entrar na grade de TV e selecionar o canal... Não serve mais para as crianças assistirem mais TV da área Favorita.

German, French and Italian reviewers describe the same three things in the same week: slower navigation, a guide that is harder to read ahead in, and favorites that do not register.

German

benutze die App seit jahren mit meinem firetv Stick. lief wunderbar. das letzte Update vor kurzem hat es um einiges schlechter gemacht. App bedeutend langsamer als vorher. am schlimmsten ist das man nicht mehr schnell zum nächsten Sender wechseln kann.

French

je baisse ma note depuis la dernière mise à jour ...l application reste bonne mais on vois moins bien les programmes a suivre et je trouve cela plus brouillon

French

series tv cultes et quelques pepites ciné...CEPENDANT, l'app tv devient ingerable: planning qui lutte pour s'afficher,ajout en favoris non pris en compte,navigation entre les menus laborieux.

Italian

per quale motivo avete cambiato l'interfaccia su Fire TV? ora è pessima e tutte le anteprime dei canali rallentano in modo drastico la fluidità del app.

What This Does Not Show

Nine days is nine days. A post-update spike decays, and some of it is always the shock of an unfamiliar screen rather than a lasting problem. The volume numbers here describe the first nine days of a rollout, not a permanent state. The capability claims are a different matter, because a removed button does not come back on its own.

We measured Android only. Pluto TV holds 4.78 from 1,619,784 App Store ratings against 3.74 from 806,197 on Google Play, and the iOS app shipped its own new version on 4 September. We did not read a single iOS review, so nothing here says whether iPhone users saw the same changes.

A count of complaints is not a rate of failure. Pluto TV's Play histogram holds 403,450 five-star ratings against 164,799 one-star, and we read none of the positive ones. Twenty per cent of all-time ratings sitting at one star is unusually high for an app this size, but it is a lifetime figure, not a September figure.

We did not install the new build and check each claim. Everything above is what reviewers wrote. Where a control may have moved rather than been removed, we counted the reviewer's experience of not finding it, and said so.

Nobody writes a review when the channel changes correctly. The 145 are, by definition, the people who had a reason to complain. What this corpus gives you is the shape and the timing of the complaints, not a verdict on the redesign.

Read the Full Breakdown

You can read the full negative review breakdown for Pluto TV on Android and Pluto TV on iOS, or go to the trust check and apps like it. For the free streaming category as a whole, see Tubi vs Pluto TV vs The Roku Channel ranked by complaints. For the ad question on the paid side, see HBO Max showing ads on the ad free plan. For the same update-broke-it pattern elsewhere, see the Roku app that cannot find the TV and how app updates kill ratings.