I just wanna write these down so that I can stop cursing them silently!
The page you're on isn't synced to other devices until you close the book on the current device.
This is SO WEIRD, and frustrates me all the time. I have an iPhone and an iPad, and I read books on both. Let's say I'm on page 20 when I start reading on my phone. Around page 40, I lock the phone or switch to another app without tapping the "back arrow" in the upper left, because why would I do that? So, at some point, whether a few minutes or hours later, if pick up the ipad and open the book there? What page should I be on? Invariably, no matter how much time has passed, the ipad thinks I'm still on page 20. Even worse: it now sets the "synced position" to page 20, because that's the most recent page iCloud has seen me reading!
This happens especially when I've been reading the same book in both places, because the text is "open" in both. But... it's such a tiny bit of metadata. When I pick up the iPad with the book already "open," why in hell doesn't it check the server and move to page 40? If I manually close the book before I put down the iPad (why would I do this), and manually close the book before I put down my iPhone (again, this isn't how these devices are used), then the next time I open the book on either device, it will open to the most recent page.
Anyway! This frustrates me!
Dragging my finger to highlight a passage requires character-precision at the end of a partial line.
I can start dragging and then move down the right side of the screen to highlight all the lines in between... except for the last line of a paragraph. It just... doesn't highlight. If I move a bit farther down, it highlights to the end of the next paragraph's first line. Wha....? So then I remember that I have to move my finger to the letters at the end of the paragraph, and that having my finger past those characters means they don't get highlighted. I just... what the fuck? I'm pretty sure it used to work the sensible way.
I hold the controversial opinion that software should be developed by people who actually use that software, which increasingly doesn't feel like the case with Apple's apps. Further, it should incorporate external feedback and research, which also doesn't seem to be in style over there. Even further, the same people should be working on the same app for more than 9-12 months, so their experience can be carried into the next round of iterations. Reports from inside Apple suggest this is hardly ever the case; engineers get shuffled around to different projects every year or so. Which helps explain why their apps get totally rebuilt with fewer features every couple of years!
Hhhhhhhhhhngh! These are two very small examples of a thousand other instances of this kind of, "nobody took the time to understand how this should really work," all the way across Apple's software. Not to mention all the ways the software is just straight up broken, or being redesigned to do less and take up more visual space. I remain impressed with their hardware, but my Apple software frustration level is really getting dire.