Bound - Audiobook Player 4+

I will start by saying in the entire time I’ve owned apple products (more than 10 years) I have actually paid for less than 5 apps and have reviewed about the same amount. So safe to say I only download free apps, and I don’t leave reviews. I had been using the book player free app for a couple years to play my downloaded audiobooks but that app is beyond frustrating. Books would never load into the app after restarting, reinstalling etc. my daughter was having the same issues with it. So I gave in and started looking around for other options. There were no free ones that seemed good at all so I FINALLY (after literally days of considering) decided to buy the Bound app. I’m as stingy with money as can be (yep, I’m poor 🤷🏻‍♀️) but I am so glad I got this app. It works flawlessly and is so crazy easy to use. My daughter now uses it as well and neither of us has had any issues (knock on wood 😬). I love that I can speed up the audiobooks and it always keeps my place when I close it. Books download into the app quickly as well. I prefer to either download my files from google drive or do the web upload where I upload my files to a specific address and it automatically downloads them to my phone. I literally have no complaints about this app. This is my favorite app of at least 100 I have on my phone. Listen to it probably 5+ hours every day. I hope this app always works as well as it has for the past 6 months because of it breaks, I will riot 🔥

I’ve been using this app for about three years now. Prior to this app I tried everything under the sun, from syncing books over via iTunes to a variety of other apps. This is the only app that lets me use the standard iOS document interface to load files, while offering a great audiobook listening experience. I also appreciate the tasteful design and nice features for managing things like cover images. If you have a reason to listen to any audio files in an audiobook style interface this is the app to use. (Don’t forget that your public library probably has tons of great audiobooks on CD! It’s easy to rip them and add them to this app!)

iBooks has become a disaster, and I got this since it supports CarPlay. It works, but some notes:
* Cover Art appears in the app but not on the car’s CarPlay screen, instead it shows a default icon for the “currently playing” book. It seems much MUCH more stable than iBooks, but why use CarPlay if you’re not going to use the screen and show the cover art?
* Downloading from a network drive is wonderful, but after I download a book it drops me back out to the main directory listing, at the top. This makes me have to scroll all the way down to find where I was at again.
* When downloading from a network drive I wish I didn’t have to select all the files and could just select a directory. Whether it’s “yes, download Prisoner of Azkahban” or it’s “yes, download the entire “Harry Potter series, even if that means multiple subdirectories below this one”, being able to choose a directory instead of a file (or set of files) would make life much much easier