FanFiction Plus & AO3 Reader for Android

While the Captcha issue is resolved, I am now coming across another issue more frequently: the Captcha just not showing up, so stories are refusing to be updated OR downloaded. The app is being uncooperative no matter what I do, and I can’t send a bug report for whatever reason. PLEASE FIX.

There is absolutely no direction with where you can ever submit something to write, and the interface is really lacking.

I continue to use this app, if just for the convenience of being able to keep an alt account logged in for PMs and reviews. When I first found this app, FFN’s official app didn’t support downloads for offline reading, so this was the better option for me. It did have some flaws. The ad service or its integration seemed to be horrendously optimized; my phone used to get almost painfully hot while running the app, but I noticed it only happened when I was online. Support was pleasantly available, but came across as unpleasantly unconcerned with the physical discomfort their app caused (a discomfort that didn’t happen running theoretical more strenuous apps like games). Their suggested solution: pay to make the ads go away. Rephrased, pay to stop the app’s or ad service’s poor optimization from being almost physically painful from phone overheating. That’s borderline abusive. But I used the app too much to give it up. SoI bit the bullet and paid to remove ads, and sure enough the app stopped causing my phone to become so hot. And all was well... briefly. Then came the CAPTCHA nightmares. For a while, the app was completely bricked, unable to perform any actions because of a hidden CAPTCHA. The dev quickly pushed out an update, though, which showed the CAPTCHA in an in-app pop-up, and that worked well for a while. You’d have to fill out a CAPTCHA once every dozen chapters, and it made downloads more tedious, but still manageable. But then we get to the reason why I say “while it lasted”, because this app as it stands is indeed done for, and I haven’t noticed dev action which would mitigate the current issues. FFN was moved away from CAPTCHAs and to CloudFlare DDOS protection. At seemingly random times, FFN will require a “5 second” detour (often closer to 30 seconds) to decide if you’re a benign user or not, and it often fails for no obvious reason. It has also made it completely impossible to download larger stories for offline reading (the limit seems to be between 10 and 20 chapters before problems start). And woe to you if you still have ads enabled. I can’t confirm, because I paid to have them removed, but I imagine that the app must nearly be unusable between all the ads and all the CloudFlare interruptions. And for what? The official app has dark mode now, it allows downloads now (not intuitively - press and hold to bring up the option, may have to multi-select first). The only difference to me is that this app lets you highlight and copy text, which is useful, but not enough to sell the app to a new user. In my opinion, there is something this app needs to do, and something which can at least put it on life support. First, there needs to be an option to export your library. Not necessarily the downloaded stories, but the titles and urls and current chapter. Second, in order to restore some usability, users should be given the option to download a range of chapters, rather than the app just trying to download everything at once. Let us not fight CloudFlare while trying to download later chapters because the app just gets stuck at the first 20. What if you only want to read the last 10 chapters of a hundreds-long story? You shouldn’t have to deal with the headache of trying and failing to download earlier chapters before getting to the first one you actually care about. Because honestly, right now there’s no positive incentive to this app. There’s only a negative incentive from the official app, not letting you have multiple accounts signed in and not being able to swap between them. That, and habit, and the fact that your reading history is held hostage.

This app has had problems for years, but they usually were minor inconveniences that I could overlook; User profiles cannot be edited, saving/favoriting stories does not work, story information being incorrect, consistent download problems. But the latest issues are beyond that. Captcha every time I save a story, sometimes four or five for longer ones? More Captcha while reading one I’ve already downloaded? What’s the point of downloading it if it’s still downloading data?

I understand that free services have to be paid for somehow, but if you leave the app and try to come back, it crashes and you have to watch 1-2 ads to get back to where you were. You can’t even make a simple search without watching a 30 second ad. It makes the app nearly unusable.