Pardon me, but I feel a rant coming on:
I’ve identified another pretty major problem/annoyance with the new app. Every time that I turn my phone (Samsung Galaxy A20/Android Version 10) from landscape to portrait and back again when using the comic reader, the phone’s status-and-navigation-bar overlay pops up, covering a significant portion of the comic. I then have to either double tap the phone’s screen to get it to go away, or else turn it three times instead of once (landscape to portrait to landscape to portrait). This used to happen about once every three or four pages on the old app, and was pretty darn annoying then, but it is now happening on Every. Single. Page. And I tend to need to turn my phone on every single page, especially since I mainly read Silver and Bronze Age comics, which have those long vertical panels on pretty much every single page that necessitate portrait-mode viewing on a phone. I think you can imagine how annoying it is for me to have this overlay pop up and then have to double tap my phone’s screen or turn my phone three times on every single page to get it to go away when I’m just trying to enjoy reading a darn comic. I’m going to have to install a third-party immersive mode app to fix this. I shouldn’t have to do that. Immersive mode should have been built in to the DC Universe Infinite app from the beginning.
A couple of other problems with the comic reader that I’ve identified:
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The “Browse” page, which shows thumbnail images of every page of a comic and allows you to navigate easily to any page, will not load the image for every page. This is pretty consistent across all comics, but which pages don’t load seems to change (I’ve seen it mainly happening with pages 19-21). This is another new problem that wasn’t present on the old app.
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The last page of every comic is still waaaaay too sensitive about bringing up the “Up Next”/end card page. Swiping the final page of a comic even one millimeter to the left will bring up the end card, and it’s safe to say that simply swiping a page up will inevitably also swipe a page at least a millimeter left every time. So I usually have to tap back from the end card page about 3 or 4 times on every single comic I read. You can imagine how annoying that is as well (especially since the last page of a comic often tends to be one of the most dramatic; kinda ruins the moment). I end up literally having to drag a page to the right as I swipe it up, kind of scooping it up the screen, just to prevent the end card from showing up. This is an OLD problem that was present on the old app. With the improvements to the comic reader that were touted, I thought that surely this would have been fixed in the Infinite update. But no. No it wasn’t.
I just have to say it: with all of the problems listed above, and the backwards/reverse user lists issue that I previously reported (which is the biggest problem of them all, as far as I’m concerned, and which still hasn’t been fixed), the new DC Universe Infinite app is functionally much worse than the old DC Universe app. I don’t understand how this happened. The Infinite update was supposed to improve the app, not break it almost to the point of unusability. It’s gotten so bad that I actively don’t want to use the app anymore, and have come to almost dread using it because of all of the annoyances and problems, both major and minor, that I know I’m going to encounter when I just want to read a comic. It’s to the point that I am seriously starting to think about cancelling my subscription. I love DC, I love the comics, but the app itself is so atrocious and so unpleasant to use that it completely ruins the comic reading experience, turning it into a pain when it should be a pleasure. Simply put: the app needs to be fixed in a major way, and fast.
(P.S. I am very surprised that I am the only person reporting these problems. I can’t be the only one experiencing these issues, can I? Can anyone else please corroborate my reports above so that I don’t just sound like a crazy ranting person? Well, I’ll still sound like a crazy ranting person, but at least I’d be ranting about something legitimate…)
(P.P.S. Thank you soooo much to the developers for disabling usage of the old 1.56 version of the app and forcing an update to the broken version 3.0. I was intending on continuing to use 1.56 until [unless?] these problems are solved, but it looks like that’s out of the question. Can’t wait to have to swipe all the way to the bottom of my 200-issue comic list that I’m about to start on every time I want to read a comic. Thanks. Thanks guys. 'Preciate it.)