As a jellyfin fan myself, I'd like to address a couple of your points.
For 1, 2, 3(?), 4, you appear to be referring to the Apple TV client, which is written in an entirely different language and frameworks, and entirely different authors. (This is due to the excessive limitations on languages put in place by apple in their ecosystem).
Jellyfin has dozens of other platforms.
In regard to #3, Jellyfin does use file watchers.
For #5, there is a setting to grab trailers. Additionally, if the default metadata providers aren't getting you what you want, there is a baked in library of more than a dozen alternative metadata providers and a variety of other things you can use to augment what your media library provides.
For #6, I'm not sure if you're just referring to the Apple client again, but I'll add that the "Jellyscrub" feature is turned off by default, but if turned on, it will automatically generate video scrub images.
For #7, idk. I guess it's a stylistic choice? Why is there Sonarr and Radarr?
Anyway, I'm just a user, but, I'm also a Jelly-stan. So, I'd highly recommend you browse through the configuration options a bit more, particularly in regard to plugins and the many settings available in each of libraries' individual configurations.
It's not really fair to blame Apple for those dev's poor product, nor for Jellyfin's choice not to support an iOS client of their own. Plex has a fantastic iOS app, the Plex Music app is one of the prettiest music players ever produced. VLC has a fully-functional iOS app. Home Assistant's iOS client is indistinguishable from its Android client. The list of self-hosted apps that have great iOS companion apps is long and diverse.
This myth that Apple's ecosystem is so stifling isn't shared by the expansive developer community who work on Apple devices. It's far from perfect, to be sure, and they may overreach with some of their more stringent security and privacy controls (but none to my knowledge outright prevent apps like Jellyfin from being competitive). If Jellyfin wanted to release a high-quality app for Apple devices, there's nothing really stopping them.
I don't mean to suggest that your primary motivation for your opinions re: Jellyfin on iOS are the result of blind fanaticism, I'm certainly not saying any of this out of some tribal loyalty for Apple, either. The frequent partisanship surrounding Apple and Microsoft/Android has always been strange to me. Among the devices I use every day are a custom-built Windows 11 box, an M2 Mac Mini, an older PC running PopOS (Ubuntu-based), an iPad, and a Google Pixel. They're all tools, and they excel in their own areas. I like some things that aren't available to all platforms, and attempts to find reasonable alternatives don't always prevail. I like my Windows box for MS Flight Simulator, Remote Desktop Manager, and Visual Studio. I like my Mac Mini for Logic Pro, native Bash terminal, and DEVONthink. I like Linux for its infinite versatility and freedom. I like Android's customization, and Apple's unbeatable device/OS integrations and sync.
Apple TV doesn't support embedding a web browser (WKWebView/UIWebView), which means that the client app needs to be completely re-implemented. For a small team of volunteers this can be quite a challenging undertaking, and will take development time away from other apps.
It is in fact extremely limiting, since you must have a Macintosh to create a iOS app, meanwhile you can create Android apps on Windows / Macintosh / Linux
Thanks for the detailed reply, I’ll look through my configuration and see if I can find where the issues are with the file watching. You’re right, many of them are likely because I have to use Infuse, due to the native Apple TV client being so bad.
When I say there is UI jank and lag, what I mean is that content re-renders and shifts around when you search, results flash in and out with loading animations. the placeholder tiles are clearly visible and I can see the tiles loading in when I scroll. This happens in both the web client and Apple TV. I believe the issue is the API design that’s dictating how clients fetch and load data, some virtualization in the frontend implementation, and a lack of prefetching/caching.
I have a 10 gig network to a very fast NAS setup and a very small media library. the image assets should be able to be cached/streamed/prefetched from the server so that I do not ever see a placeholder tile (maybe if you jump ahead like 1/2 the library, then that makes sense).
Perhaps this is one of those things where people haven’t seen what’s really possible performance-wise from a local server and they’re OK with something that feels like a webpage. But nothing feels like a native app that just has all my content there all the time. It feels like a remote service even though it’s < 1 ms away on a hardwired multigig network. Does that make sense? Do you agree with that?
For 1, 2, 3(?), 4, you appear to be referring to the Apple TV client, which is written in an entirely different language and frameworks, and entirely different authors. (This is due to the excessive limitations on languages put in place by apple in their ecosystem).
Jellyfin has dozens of other platforms.
In regard to #3, Jellyfin does use file watchers.
For #5, there is a setting to grab trailers. Additionally, if the default metadata providers aren't getting you what you want, there is a baked in library of more than a dozen alternative metadata providers and a variety of other things you can use to augment what your media library provides.
For #6, I'm not sure if you're just referring to the Apple client again, but I'll add that the "Jellyscrub" feature is turned off by default, but if turned on, it will automatically generate video scrub images.
For #7, idk. I guess it's a stylistic choice? Why is there Sonarr and Radarr?
Anyway, I'm just a user, but, I'm also a Jelly-stan. So, I'd highly recommend you browse through the configuration options a bit more, particularly in regard to plugins and the many settings available in each of libraries' individual configurations.