indyreads‪™‬ 4+

This app has great potential content wise but is extremely frustrating in that it can open up flawlessly sometimes but can consume precious time getting it to function at other times. It won’t open and I get hypnotised watching the download wheel go round and round and round and round and…………. Other times it reaches a point where it won’t progress to the next page. Glitchy is the most appropriate adjective for this app. NEEDS MORE WORK!

I love the opportunity to listen to my library’s audiobooks on this app, but boy is it badly designed. For starters, I have my iphone permanently set on ‘zoom’ display (as my eyesight ain’t what it used to be) and it’s impossible to access the play/pause etc buttons on audiobooks on this app with phone display on zoom. I gather the designers of the app did not realise that some of the people who want to listen to audiobooks are also people who can’t see very well. Who knew those two groups overlapped?! No doubt I just blew your minds with that Venn diagram. I also find that whenever I open the app and tap a book I’m in the middle of, it’s a complete lottery as to where the app will decide to start playing said book. It could be back at the beginning, anywhere in the middle (but rarely the spot I’m actually up to), or right at the very end. So I have to hunt down my spot in the audiobook nearly every time I start listening, which is pretty difficult without being able to access the fast forward and rewind buttons. Oh, and what’s more, audiobooks will often randomly restart at the beginning when they reach the end of a chapter instead of just moving on to the following chapter. If this app is designed by volunteers, then I apologise for complaining. But if you are getting paid good money to make and update this app, then… Quit your day job.

I don’t normally leave bad reviews, I know there’s generally a passionate team behind an app like this and I know a lot of work goes into them. But I clicked the Help button under the More tab and the wheel spun and spun. For those who say it was my connection, all my other apps were working fine. Also, the Help button was the straw that led to this review.

I got To Kill a Mockingbird on loan, the entire thing downloaded, everything seemed good to go. But for some strange reason when I started the audiobook, it would simply loop each track, forcing me to go into the track list and manually choose the next one. Also, as I listen to audiobooks in my car, this app continually went to sleep so when a chapter would begin looping, I’d have to unlock my phone and navigate the list to start the next one.

Listening to this last audiobook was so frustrating that I went to report a bug or contact someone but when the Help button went nowhere, I decided to come here instead.