VortX 0.5.3: Every Rating, New Episode Cards and a Quicker Player

Build 272. VortX 0.5.3 brings ratings from every major service, shown as each service's own logo on cards, title pages, episodes and posters. Series pages get new episode cards and a Trailers & Extras row, and the player answers the remote much faster, most of all on Apple TV. All packages are built by the public release workflow. This is the Latest release, so the download links on vortx.tv serve it. The automatic-update feeds are unchanged.

Fixed

• A slow, glitchy player, most of all on Apple TV. The player rebuilt its whole screen on every background update, including the progress it saves when you pause and every 20 seconds while you watch. That made the controls slow to appear when you paused and could make playback stutter. The player now redraws only for what it shows, on Apple TV, iPhone, iPad and Mac.
• Much less work while you watch, most of all on Mac. Saving your place used to check and rewrite your whole account as often as every 5 seconds, twice per save, and upload all of it once a minute. VortX now saves your place every 20 seconds and writes it to disk at most every 30 seconds, and straight away when you pause, seek, close the player, switch away from the app or quit. While you keep watching, it uploads your place at most every 5 minutes, and within seconds once you pause or stop. Titles with thousands of sources no longer slow the player controls down, the title page behind the player stops redrawing while you watch, and data carried over from 0.4 is converted once instead of on every sync. Android saves every 20 seconds instead of every 5 too.
• All sources shows every add-on again. On a title with hundreds of sources, choosing All showed the first add-on's rows and left every other add-on as an empty heading. Each add-on now shows its top sources, and Show more adds more. iPhone, iPad and Mac.
• Built-in add-ons you switched off can be switched back on. A built-in add-on switched off on another device, on the web or in an older version had no way back on. The eye button now shows for any add-on that is off, on every platform. Hidden add-ons are in the Add-ons tab, and hidden Home rows are under Add-ons > Customize catalogs.
• Mac: the window buttons show and hide together with the player controls.

New

• Every rating, everywhere. IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, the Popcornmeter, Metacritic, TMDB, Letterboxd, Trakt, SIMKL, MyAnimeList and Kitsu, on Home, Library, Discover, title pages and posters. Each score shows the service's own mark: the IMDb tag, a tomato that turns into a green splat below 60%, Metacritic's coloured score square and so on. Cards show as many scores as they fit, and the title page shows all of them. Some titles gain more scores over the next days as they are collected.
• Episode ratings. Each episode shows its IMDb, TMDB and Trakt scores, and a season's best episode is marked Top rated.
• New episode cards on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV. The full episode still with a frosted panel below for the number, title, synopsis, runtime and air date, plus Up next, Watched and progress. Season posters now show on iPhone too.
• Trailers & Extras on Apple. Title pages list trailers, teasers, clips and featurettes, ready to play.
• Frosted glass player controls tinted with your accent colour on iOS 26 and macOS 26.

Android

Android gets every rating with the services' marks on cards, title pages and episodes, ratings on landscape cards and Android TV backdrop cards (which showed none before), the fix for switched-off built-in add-ons, and lighter saving while you watch.

VortX is Apple first. The Android APK is still an early technical preview rather than the finished app, so expect missing features and rough edges.

Please test

• On Apple TV, pause and resume a few times while something plays: the controls should appear straight away, and playback should not hitch every few seconds.
• On Mac, play something for a few minutes and use the controls: the app should stay responsive, and Continue Watching should show where you stopped.
• Open a movie with many sources and choose All: every add-on should list its top sources, not just the first.
• Look at a rail on Home: each card should show its scores as the services' logos. Open a title to see every score.
• Open a series and look at the episode cards: each episode should show its own scores.
• If you switched off a built-in add-on in an older version, open the Add-ons tab and use its eye button to turn it back on.

Install

Mac (.dmg). Download VortX-macOS-v0.5.3-ci.dmg, drag VortX into Applications, then clear Apple's one-time quarantine: open it once, click Done, then System Settings > Privacy & Security > Open Anyway (or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/VortX.app). The Mac app is for Apple silicon, needs macOS 14 or later, and is ad-hoc signed rather than notarized. macOS may ask for your password so VortX can use its saved sign-in information in Keychain after replacing the app; approve only a prompt that names VortX. Step-by-step guide: Install on Mac.

iPhone, iPad, Apple TV (sideload the IPA). The IPAs are unsigned, because VortX is open-source and distributed outside the App Store with no Apple Developer ID yet, so you re-sign them yourself with Sideloadly, AltStore / SideStore, or Signulous. No jailbreak. Use VortX-iOS-v0.5.3-ci.ipa for iPhone and iPad. On Apple TV, VortX-tvOS-v0.5.3-ci.ipa is VortX TV with Top Shelf, and VortX-tvOS-lite-v0.5.3-ci.ipa is VortX TV Lite without it; both need tvOS 18 or later. Step-by-step guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Android phone, tablet and TV. VortX-0.5.3-full-mpv-universal.apk includes VortX Player. VortX-0.5.3-play-media3-universal.apk is the Media3 variant. Each APK contains both the phone and the Android TV interface. Choose the variant you already use so it installs over your current version. The Play bundle is also attached for its distribution workflow.

The Apple packages were built by the release workflow from the v0.5.3-rc.5 tag, the same commit as v0.5.3; SHA256SUMS-ci.txt lists a SHA-256 checksum for each so you can confirm your download is intact. The Android packages were built and signed by the release workflow from the same v0.5.3-rc.5 tag; check them with SHA256SUMS-android.txt and SIGNING_PROVENANCE.txt.