First impression of safari for android
The beta test of the new Safari app got off to a bit of a rough start. It was impossible to download outside the US for quite a while, which was pretty annoying for something you pay for. But a hiccup is a hiccup. Took a bit of a hack around but I got the app to download. (nothing fancy, just using the browser to force a download rather than using the native access to the play store download)
The beta app has a dedicated Google+ group (or a pen to keep all of the eager/annoyed beta testers contained within) which is a really interesting option.
The app is currently very much in the early stage of its development so all you can do really is sign in, download books to your device and read them. (people have been indicating fails in all stages of that process actually)
In terms of the reading experience it isn't great yet. There are two chunky buttons at the bottom of the app which help you navigate from section to section or chapter to chapter. This is pretty ugly and will likely be replaced by swipe gestures etc. but they haven't been coded in yet. They likely will.
In regard to the two ugly buttons however, they seems to lose all sense of place. They currently show a different chapter number from the one of the book. As seen by this screenshot below of the second section of chapter one:
After downloading four or five books however the entire reading process borked up.
I lost the ability for text to render inside books at all for about a day:
As you can see, header and footer okay. Text nowhere to be seen.
I pressed everything I could to no avail.
I eventually got text back a day or so later by crashing the app and sending a bug report. As I did the text magically reappeared in the background. Like so:
Odd one!
What is even stranger is that this now happens on every load of the app. Yay?
In some books I am also getting strange symbols instead of chapters. This was from a pre-publication book so it might be due to that but no idea:
other thoughts
The app is seriously beta, well alpha really.
Safari doesn't yet support a lot of basic features such as syntax highlighting, editing or tweaking profile data nor the ability to watch videos.
As such at this stage it is just a case of report crash report crash report crash. I'm not going to read too much into the app until it is more stable and then the finer details of crafting out a product start to emerge.
In terms of some less immediate features, it would be nice to also see an ability to schedule downloads, so if I am on the road or air I can say "when I'm in wifi get this book".
Notifications of new books in my areas of interest would also be nice so that I can quickly queue them if they look interesting.
Similarly, when can we get some syntax highlighting sugar in there?
so..
Being part of this journey is fun and it is also informative for the product I am building. Allyooop! is basically a platform that lets you submit, track and measure your app's alpha and beta journey. It lets you select tester profiles as well as have both normal users as well as an army of bots test and pull apart your app. It even has a select team of consultants and product experts able to give you their input on important functionality or possible pivots.
Allyooop! also has load testing and chaos-testing functionalities so that you are able to really get the most out of your beta period. However, all of that is for another day.