I have been using the iOS app for a while now and I have been testing the Android app with a new device. I notice that there appears to not be any way to change page in a lesson other than swiping. This is unfortunate for me since I find swiping many times with my finger to be painful and doing it with a stylus is a little awkward. I would love it if there were more options given to change page.
A very nice quality of life feature that the Kindle app on Android (probably also on iOS) has is the ability to use the volume buttons on the device to turn pages. This can be turned on the settings page and eases reading on many devices. I think this would be a great optional feature for the LingQ app and easy to implement.
Ideally the page would also have invisible page-forward and page-backward buttons in the left and right margins next to the text. This might be more difficult to get right. These buttons do exist already on the browser reader and I think should be made available on the app.
Thanks for your feedback and suggestion.
At the moment, I don’t think we will make any changes there in the near future, since we are focusing on other things now, and to be honest, nobody every complained that swiping pages is painful. But once we sort out things we are currently working on for both apps, we will see what we can do.
I have quite sensitive skin and using touchscreens with my finger gets genuinely painful very quickly. I think most people are fine with it though.
Actually the reason I bring it up now is that I just got an eInk tablet that runs Android and the LingQ Android app runs surprisingly good on it. I hope this is something you guys are paying close attention to because using LingQ on an eInk tablet device is a bit of a game-changer and the technology is now there to do it. The Android app just needs a few minor quality of life tweaks for these devices, the main one being page switching which is really annoying when it can only be done by swiping. The reason is the screens are less responsive.
By the way, the website also works pretty well on this device.
Great. I feel like this is super low hanging fruit for you guys and wouldn’t make a bad additional propaganda point for the app. At least on the eInk device I have the Android app already functions 100% with good performance. I can even play YouTube videos in the app via the embedded YT player (no idea why I would want to, but it works and it doesn’t even look so bad). There are just a few minor tweaks that would make it feel much better on such devices.
Other than page turning, there are a few minor issues. Even though this is a color screen, status 1, 2, and 3 LingQs all look about the same and the underline for status 4 LingQs are too thin to be visible. Ghosting (where contents previously displayed leave an imprint on the background) is also quite bad.
Here are a few examples of things that could make a big difference from my two days using it, just in case you decide to look into this at some point.
page turning could be made easier (see my original post)
the page turning slide animation could be removed for better performance and to reduce ghosting
the little shadows around the lingq and new word bubbles could be removed for better performance and to reduce ghosting
an automatic refresh of the screen when changing pages would probably solve the ghosting problem (other reader apps do this I think)
lingq status colors could be tweaked to make them more distinguishable, probably for black and white screens it is not really possible though
Also, when clicking on a word, the app seems to work by drawing a bubble with some of the contents at the top of the page and then redraws the bubble in the correct location. I assume this is so fast that on a normal screen it is not visible but it is visible on the eInk screen. I wonder if there is a purpose for this extra step or if it is something left in that the devs forgot about.
Exactly. It’s what I have wanted since I first used LingQ back in 2012. I’ll probably post some images and videos of the app in use on this device tomorrow.