Anyone here work on Amazon Kindle iOS app?

2 pointsby stmw9 mesi fa3 comments

The Kindle iPhone app has changed greatly, going from what felt like a quiet, efficient clone of the physical Kindle to a something bigger and less pleasant. After many years of happiness, to this user it now feels like an unstable, many-click portal to the larger platform. For example, instad of resuming where you were reading, it always goes back to "for you" page, with "your library" as an afterthought in the background. It literally takes 3 clicks to get back to the book you were reading, with various zoomed-in promotions. It uses lots of resources and often locks up.

The question is: if you were an engineer who worked on this, are there some good reasons why it is this way? Am I missing something in Settings to get it back to be like it was? What happened to Kindle iOS app?

[While I originally started writign this earlier, John Carmack asked something similar recently on X].

3 comments

rzzzwilson9 mesi fa

The degradation in the user experience has been happening for quite a while. I have given up reporting any problems with the reader as they either can't fix the problem or just don't see a problem that they should fix. Part of the problem is that the reader, for Amazon, is store-front advertising whereas the poor end user just wants to read a book.

stmw9 mesi fa

At least some of it is clearly intentional - I am just wondering if someone at Amazon with a throw-away account wants to explain it to the rest of us..

mkmk9 mesi fa

The app reopens to where I am reading when I open it, unless I've manually quit the app. If I quit the app, the it still frequently opens to where I was last time, although there may be some reset period after which it opens the 'your library' page. In that case, an icon representing the book I'm currently reading is visible in the bottom left, and I can open it with one tap.