The Palace Project 4+

App is good

The app have a few issues, first of all if you are listening to a book and you have to do something else and forget to bookmark it then you are lost because the app won’t take you to where you left reading, second of all, everything I want to go back to bookmarks the app crashes, then the bookmarks won’t open at all, if it was not for these issues the app would be perfect! I love that there is so many books available

Tough to use

I like the way this app looks, and it is simple to navigate, however, I’ve had some dealbreaker issues with it, specifically with audiobooks. I’ve seen at least one other review that had things I experienced, including overheating phone, and fast battery drainage (which are probably related to each other). i’ve also experienced it starting a chapter and then 30 to 40 seconds in it’ll skip back to the beginning. Another issue that has been very frustrating, and to me the biggest dealbreaker, is that it downloaded an audiobook and broke it into an insane amount of chapters. It was the third Game of Thrones book, which is a nearly 50 hour audiobook, and it broke it into 844 small sections which were titled chapters. It makes it very time-consuming and frustrating to find a spot if you lose your place. Also, it caused the downloading of it to take a long time, I don’t have the technical knowledge as to why, but took like an hour. It also froze while downloading and I deleted and re-installed the app and still had the same issue with download time. I hope they can fix this stuff, but I saw that somebody else had a battery drainage problem from like a year before this, so not sure how common it is.

Not great - not bad, but has its issues

Leaving a review as it looks like the CS team is pretty responsive. I really like the interface to search for books, which lets you drill down by genre and subgenre but also allows you to View All. Much better than Libby in the ease of use there. I wish there was a “save for later” type functionality - maybe someday. :)

Where things fall apart for me is the audiobook playback. Biggest issue is that it heats up my phone and absolutely chews through my battery - doing nothing but listening (through Bluetooth headphones, connected to my home wifi) for the ~90 minutes drained my battery (iPhone 11, 75% performance per Settings) from ~75% to ~30%. Another quibble is that when moving from one track to the next, it seems to play the new track for 15-90 seconds and then jump back to the beginning. That’s a little weird and kind of annoying, but not a dealbreaker for me like the battery issue.

Developer Response ,

Hi and thank you for using the Palace app! We are currently optimizing our audiobook features and will be rolling out bug fixes for the audiobook skipping. We’re also sorry to hear that you’ve run into some technical issues regarding battery usage. If you contact us at appreview@thepalaceproject.org with the specifics surrounding your experience, we’re more than happy to open a support ticket.